Study on key performance indicators to investigate long-term performance of post-disaster housing

Abstract

Post disaster reconstruction is a vital phase in disaster management cycle. It aims to restore and improve pre-disaster living condition of affected communities. It is an opportunity to lay foundation for long-term risk reduction, also to contribute safer and sustainable development. Research has shown that permanent re-construction following a natural disaster is often inefficiently managed, uncoordinated, and importantly overlooks the long term requirements of the affected community. Adopting a long-term approach to re-construction however is required to ensure sustainable housing provisions and sustainability of local communities. Following the Tsunami devastation in 2004 in Sri Lanka, thousands of houses were damaged and destroyed and were rebuilt. Two approaches; “Donor Driven” approach and “Owner Driven” approaches have been employed to rebuild post disaster housing reconstruction. Studies revealed smooth flow of this construction process was disturbed by certain gaps that occurred throughout the above post disaster reconstruction programme. How these housing schemes perform in the long-term is seldom investigated. As the post tsunami housing schemes have now been in place for a reasonable period of time, it is timely to investigate how the schemes have performed up to now. A key step towards assessing long-term performance is to identify criteria to be used for assessment. In light of the above, this paper documents and suggest Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to be assessed in order to investigate the long-term performance of post-disaster housing reconstruction projects in Sri Lanka. An extensive literature review and expert interviews aided this task. Findings of this research will inform the policy-makers and practitioners to outline the KPIs to investigate how the post-disaster housing re-construction projects have performed in the long-term.