Build Back Better: Strategic approach to post-disaster reconstruction as an opportunity for development

One of the strategies of post-disaster recovery programs has been taking advantage of the opportunity to enhance the community physical, social, economic and environmental resiliency. This strategy is known as the concept of “Build Back Better” after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and refers the need to improve the conditions of affected communities in the recovery process.
This study aims to build a practical framework for the concept of “build back better” after disaster, explains it through analyzing the concepts of recovery, vulnerability and resiliency. Therefore, it reviews the existing guidelines in related studies for extraction and classification the “BBB” principles. The In this study the library studies were used as a research tolls and the thematic analysis was used as a method of analysis.
Findings: 9 principles on the concept of “build back better” were extracted by analyzing the existing guidelines and were classified in the form of three main categories of risk reduction, community recovery, and implementation. These principles and categories can be used to establish a comprehensive framework to “build back better” to provide solutions for complex situations after disasters.
This study investigated the existing guidelines in the field of “BBB” and tried to create a comprehensive framework through the integration of existing comments and create commonalities between them. This framework includes 3 categories and 9 sub-categories. Main categories are risk reduction, community recovery, and implementation; sub-categories include estimation of future disaster risk, enhancing the building codes and construction technology, land use planning, community consultation and participation, social recovery, economic recovery, organisational design, legal consideration, management of knowledge and resources.
Finally emphasis is, according to the different circumstances of communities, implementing the above-mentioned principles is facing to limitations such as affordability, time constraints, and local traditions. Therefore the coping solutions must be examined to make possible these principles.