Core Course 3: Disaster Recovery Practice and Development

Recovery refers to the actions taken in the aftermath of a disaster to ideally reduce future risk and bring back life to normal in all aspects of health, livelihoods, housing and overall wellbeing. It focuses on enabling the affected populations to resume life with the added dimension of reducing risks and vulnerabilities that led to the disaster in the first place and avoid creating new ones. It provides opportunity to link to the more major, long-term development and climate change adaptation goals in the regions affected.

Ideally, development policy and practice should include disaster risk reduction measures. However in reality, such recalibration unfortunately occurs in the aftermath of a disaster and in the designing of recovery programs. Decisions and practices concerning recovery become an important pathway for long-term development.

The course is designed to help students understand the linkages between how vulnerability impacts people’s life and its relation to disasters, disaster recovery and long-term development. The main content areas of the course include:

• Introduction to recovery practices, their possibilities, politics and limitations.
• Pre-disaster recovery planning and post disaster recovery needs assessment.
• Early recovery as an important linking stage between recovery and development.
• Housing reconstruction: challenges and opportunities  
• Psycho-social and mental health interventions
• Livelihood recovery
• Exit and hand over strategies in recovery planning
• Linkages to disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation