A critical junctures approach to disaster recovery policies : an idea whose time has come?

Abstract

Analysing disaster recovery, understood as a complex process that spans multiple disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities [1], is an ambitious undertaking, that requires a broad set of instruments to capture all relevant dimensions [2]. This paper proposes that a critical juncture approach, as used in institutional analysis [3, 4], can be a useful addition to existing approaches to analyse the process of disaster recovery. In contrast to concepts like focusing events [5], the concept of critical junctures allows to gauge the impact of institutional legacies through longer timespans [4] and is, thereby, especially useful in the effort to better understand long-term trajectories of recovery policies. To assess this claim, a cursory literature review was conducted to examine the approaches used thus far by social scientists to research disaster recovery and the new critical juncture approach. Subsequently, a short illustrative case study was used to demonstrate some first applications of the critical juncture approach. This process-tracing analysis confirms that examining critical junctures helps to identify long-term trends in disaster recovery policies and how they relate to the institutional dimension of the process.