Enabling factors for financing and implementing postdisaster operations

This paper highlights how governments and other actors can prepare for the governance challenges of disaster response, recovery, and reconstruction. It identifies two sets of enabling factors need to be in place before disaster events occur to help avoid operational pitfalls:

1. structures and plans, including financing mechanisms and clear roles and procedures; and

2. trust, knowledge, partnership, and mutual accountability among domestic and external actors.

Joint simulation exercises, for example, can help build working relationships and experiential knowledge. The paper’s recommendations draw on case studies of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu (2015), and the 2010 flood in Pakistan.