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

In Nepal the main government-led and donor-supported housing reconstruction programme has
failed 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?