(Re)Constructing Disaster Risk: Making Housing Reconstruction Projects’ Disaster Risk Contributions Tangible

Disasters emerge out of the imposition of natural hazard phenomena on socio-ecological systems. Their creation, however, lies in the constraining of abilities to anticipate, cope, and recover in the face of natural hazard threats. The persistence of continually constrained capacities to cope lends itself to the inevitability of disaster. Although post-disaster landscapes have been highlighted as sites of risk (re)creation, rebuilding efforts’ contributions to the creation of disaster risk continue to be overlooked in literature and practice. Measuring ‘project success’ through narrow and selective criteria, while ignoring the significance of risk creation, is insufficient for ensuring those receiving housing assistance are afforded equitable capacities to evade conditions of risk. We draw on field observations, interviews, project documents, and hazard data to assess projects’ risk contributions and interrogate the creation of risk across 10 housing reconstruction projects in multi-hazard settings in Indonesia. Using a comparative case analysis, we find divergences in employed governance techniques and set these against each projects’ observed risk contributions. Given the conditions surrounding funding receipt, communities have had to accept implementing authorities’ conceptions of ‘safe’ housing or ‘safe’ locations despite overlooked hazard potentialities. Such tendencies in project governance are considered against the observed risk contributions of the project to demonstrate how the select prioritisation and projection of risk discourses creates risk for housing beneficiaries. This research uncovers means towards resisting risk-creating practices by deconstructing and making tangible risk-inducing tendencies in housing reconstruction. The articulated approach has the potential to reshape project design and evaluation protocols to avert risk-creating practices and hold practitioners accountable towards those embodying unjustly distributed risk.