Rethinking Post-Disaster Recovery：Socio-anthropological Perspectives on Repairing Environments

This book presents an original interdisciplinary approach to the study of the so-called 'recovery phase' in disaster management, centered on the notion of repairing. The volume advances thinking on disaster recovery that goes beyond institutional and managerial challenges, descriptions, and analyses. It encourages socially, politically, and ethically engaged questioning of what it means to recover after disaster.

At the center of this analysis, contributions examine the diversity of processes of repairing through which recovery can take place, and the varied meanings actors attribute to repair at different times and scales of such processes. It also analyses the multiple arenas (juridical, expert, political) in which actors are engaged in struggles of sense-making over the "what-ness" of a disaster and the paths for recovery. These struggles are interlinked with interest-based and power-based ones which maintain structural conditions of inequality and exploitation, pre-existing social hierarchies and established forms of marginality.

The work uses case studies from all over the world, cutting-edge theoretical discussions, and original empirical research to put critical and interpretative approaches in social sciences into dialogue, opening the venue for innovative approaches in the study of environmental disasters. This book will be of much interest to students of disaster management, sociology, anthropology, law and philosophy.