International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction: Special issue on exploring paradigm shifts in researching long-term disaster recovery

Sustainable disaster recovery has been defined as a set of actions communities or social systems take to alter their built, social, economic, and natural environments. These actions can vary from short-term emergency response to long-term rebuilding of affected areas. By contrast, the Build Back Better (BBB) concept, which emerged in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is defined as improving communities’ physical, social, environmental and economic conditions relative to a pre-disaster situation. However, BBB recovery has often been conflated with ‘going back’, which is unhelpful and why reframing the concept of long term disaster recovery is necessary.

This reconceptualization effort should stress the increasing importance of risk reduction and resilience across subsystems in an era of more frequent and intensive disasters. In this special issue, we call for multi-disciplinary papers that discuss different aspects of long-term disaster recovery and risk reduction, adopting new lenses for exploring topics such as: challenging the apparent assumption of linearity between short and long term recovery and promoting new frameworks to explore long-term disaster recovery and risk reduction.

Potential contributors are asked to contact the Managing Guest Editor of the special issue, Dr Hitomi Nakanishi, University of Canberra, email: hitomi.nakanishi@canberra.edu.au