Integrated measures for managing permanent housing reconstruction

Following major disasters, stakeholders appropriate substantial resources for permanent housing reconstruction to mitigate disaster risk and to facilitate sustainable community resilience to disasters. Many stakeholders have, however, identified permanent housing reconstruction as one of the least successful humanitarian interventions as many housing interventions fail to achieve their intended outcomes. As a result, there have been calls for evidence-based studies to provide guidance for policy-makers and practitioners towards effective management of permanent housing programmes. This paper seeks to identify the issues that influence the effective management of permanent housing interventions and the measures that could be applied to manage those issues. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with experts in post-disaster reconstruction and analyzed with the aid of NVivo 11 software. The findings served to validate and extend the issues influencing effective implementation of permanent housing interventions which had been identified in earlier research. These issues have been thematically classified into human resource issues; workmanship and quality issues; monitoring and control issues; coordination and communication issues; logistics and supplies issues; financial management issues; and health and safety issues. The study further identifies and presents the integrated measures that can be applied by policy-makers and practitioners to manage these issues and thus promote effective permanent housing reconstruction programmes.