In the Rubble of Resilience: Housing Reconstruction after Nepal's 2015 Earthquake

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In Nepal the main government-led and donor-supported housing reconstruction programme hasfailed to 'build back better' homes for the majority of the 800,000 earthquake-affected households nearly six years later. Reconstruction in Nepal has been shaped by the rise, since 2004, of Build Back Better and resilience-thinking in disaster recovery. Internationals working on disasters increasingly use 'resilience' as a framework for policy and planning and 'resilient' as a description of affected people. In practice resilience-thinking has led to a greater emphasis on owner (not donor) driven reconstruction, new reconstruction tools (e.g. in rebuilding finance), and new digital technologies.My research puzzle is: Why has Nepal's housing reconstruction experience been similar to poor results in other post-disaster countries, despite 'lessons learnt' in reconstruction policy and practice? I seek to answer this with a larger question: What are the political and policy implications of changing development and humanitarian practices? I will explore this through three subsidiary questions: a) What changes in development and humanitarian practice emerged from the use of innovation tools, and increasing use of 'resilience' as a policy framework? b) How did these changing practices impact policies in Nepal's 'owner-driven' housing reconstruction? c) How did the state and internationals intersect and co-produce policies on innovation, resilience and gender?