Exploratory analysis of barriers to effective post-disaster recovery

Destructive natural disasters, affect countries around the world. To recover from a disaster, the managers need to make various decisions; however, what makes the post-disaster decision making unique is lack of time to make the optimum decision. A comprehensive understanding of barriers to recovery can lead to development of policies that help prevent delays in recovery process and consequently results in resiliency. Although several studies have been performed to identify the recovery barriers, they did not provide a comprehensive review of barriers and their classification. This paper aimed to identify and categorize barriers to effective post-disaster recovery with a focus on hurricanes. An exhaustive review of 1535 publications from existing literature was performed, and after a thorough search and exclusion process, 452 publications, focusing on hurricane-related issues and authored by scientists, practitioners, etc., were collected and sorted by source of literature, disaster type, year of publication, continent of origin, and data collection method. Sixty-three (63) barriers to effective post-disaster recovery were identified and sorted into five categories: financial and economic, social, infrastructure and housing reconstruction, environment, and coordination and resources. The barriers in each category were ranked, based on how frequently they were referred in the studied literature. The results demonstrated that infrastructure and housing reconstruction category includes highest number of recovery barriers. The top two most-cited barriers in the literature were low rate of employment and low number of active small businesses. The results of this study assist decision-makers identify obstacles to effective recovery, and adopt efficient recovery strategies.