Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As the Dharahara Tower in the center of Kathmandu, Nepal collapsed in the April 25, 2015 earthquake, questions regarding human capacity to assess and reduce risk reverberated around the world. The historic tower, built in 1832 and designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, was the symbol of the city, connecting its history over two centuries to a modernizing Nepal that engaged in significant programs of disaster risk assessment and reduction, supported by international agencies and humanitarian assistance. “Nepal will rise again,” T-shirts worn by young Nepalis proudly proclaimed, but dust from the shattered tower belied the ability of the city’s decision makers to curb the sudden, destructive force of the earthquake and its massive disruption of the region’s daily operations. Decision making in disaster recovery involves both rapid scaling up of resources and personnel from external sources to rebuild a damaged community, and consequent scaling down of this influx of new actors, organizations, and resources as the community returns to daily operations. Integrating new concepts, technologies, and resources into damaged communities to rebuild the technical infrastructure in stronger, more sustainable ways represents a major challenge. Even more difficult is rebuilding the social, economic, and political infrastructure necessary to accomplish this task. The two sets of challenges are interdependent, and neither can be fully accomplished without creating substantive support from the other in a sociotechnical recovery process.

The transition from response to recovery in Nepal following the 2015 earthquakes represents an unusual set of tensions among political, economic, geographic, social, technical, and physical constraints. I examine this set of tensions in interorganizational, interjurisdictional decision making to assess how interlocking constraints affected the recovery process following the severe earthquakes. Combining a theoretical framework of complex adaptive systems with a mixed methods research design, I collected data from documentary sources regarding Nepali laws, policies, and procedures on disaster mitigation and response, content analysis of reports from local newspapers and professional organizations, and direct observations from two field trips to Nepal in June-July, 2015 and April-May, 2016. Using these sources, I identified a network of influential organizations that operated in disaster decision making and constraints that affected this process. I conclude that transition from response to recovery in Nepal represents a complex, dynamic process involving actors at different scales of operation – from local to global – that exceeded the capacity of any single actor to guide or control. I acknowledge NSF RAPID Grant #1559687.