Project: Disaster Recovery in Nepal

Disaster Recovery in Nepal

This project addresses the theoretically and practically important question of how sustainable development interventions affect the ways that rural households recover from disasters. The study is set in Nepal, where the PIs have been involved for several years in an analysis of the Multi-Stakeholder Forestry Programme, a multi-donor funded sustainable development initiative implemented in 21 districts in Nepal since 2012. Building on two waves of panel data collected prior to the earthquake (one before implementation of MSFP, one post-implementation), data will be collected from the same households to produce a third wave of panel data. The panel dataset will help address enduring questions of interest to political scientists, social scientists more generally, and interdisciplinary scholars interested in sustainable development, disaster recovery, governance, and impact evaluation. The work will contribute to a new framework focusing on how public capacity-building interventions can be analyzed in terms of the effectiveness of individual vs. collective efforts and contributions in enabling recovery from disasters.