Build Back Better Recovery Evaluation
Also known as: BBB Evaluation, Build Back Better Assessment, Resilient Recovery Evaluation
Build Back Better (BBB) recovery evaluation is a principle-based framework for assessing whether post-disaster reconstruction reduces future risk rather than merely restoring pre-disaster conditions. Formalized by Sandeeka Mannakkara, Suzanne Wilkinson, and Regan Potangaroa and demonstrated in the 2009 Victorian bushfire reconstruction, the framework organizes recovery around three categories: disaster risk reduction (safer structures and siting), community recovery (social and economic restoration), and effective implementation (stakeholder engagement, regulation, and monitoring). Under each category sit concrete principles against which a recovery effort is evaluated, comparing what was achieved with what resilient recovery requires and with the pre-disaster baseline. Endorsed within the Sendai Framework and embedded in post-disaster needs assessment, BBB evaluation turns the slogan 'build back better' into an auditable standard for resilient reconstruction.
Key highlights
- Turns the build-back-better concept into an auditable, principle-based standard for resilient recovery.
- Covers physical risk reduction, social and economic community recovery, and implementation governance together.
- Baseline comparison ensures 'better' is measured rather than assumed, distinguishing improvement from mere restoration.
- Decomposable scores support both overall judgment and targeted learning about what to strengthen.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use build-back-better recovery evaluation when you want to assess, guide, or hold accountable a reconstruction effort against the standard of resilient recovery, whether prospectively to design a recovery program or retrospectively to evaluate one. It is well suited to medium- and long-term recovery, to comparing recovery efforts across events or jurisdictions, and to embedding resilience criteria within post-disaster needs assessment and recovery frameworks. It is less appropriate for the immediate emergency phase, for purely economic loss accounting, and where reconstruction outcomes and process records are too sparse to score the principles. The framework is strongest as a structured, principle-based audit that makes the resilience content of recovery explicit and measurable.
Strengths & limitations
- Turns the build-back-better concept into an auditable, principle-based standard for resilient recovery.
- Covers physical risk reduction, social and economic community recovery, and implementation governance together.
- Baseline comparison ensures 'better' is measured rather than assumed, distinguishing improvement from mere restoration.
- Decomposable scores support both overall judgment and targeted learning about what to strengthen.
- Scoring principles involves judgment, so assessments can vary across evaluators without clear rubrics.
- Reliable evaluation requires good pre-disaster baselines and reconstruction records, which are often incomplete.
- Long-term resilience outcomes may only become apparent years later, beyond typical evaluation horizons.
- Aggregating diverse principles into an index can obscure trade-offs, such as speed versus quality of reconstruction.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What are the three categories of the build-back-better framework?
Disaster risk reduction, community recovery, and effective implementation. Risk reduction covers making the built environment safer through structural improvements and risk-based land-use planning. Community recovery covers restoring the social and economic life of affected people, including livelihoods and services. Effective implementation covers the governance that makes the other two possible — stakeholder engagement, streamlined and enforced regulation, and monitoring. Evaluating across all three ensures that 'building back better' addresses not only physical safety but also human recovery and the institutional capacity to deliver it.
How does BBB evaluation decide whether recovery was actually 'better'?
By comparing post-reconstruction conditions to the pre-disaster baseline for each principle. A recovery counts as build-back-better on a given principle only where the post-disaster state improves on what existed before — for example, buildings that exceed prior standards, more diversified local livelihoods, or stronger institutions. This baseline comparison prevents mere restoration from being mistaken for improvement and quantifies the resilience uplift that reconstruction delivered, which is the essence of what the framework measures.
How does BBB evaluation relate to post-disaster needs assessment?
They are complementary. A post-disaster needs assessment quantifies damage, loss, and recovery needs and produces a costed recovery framework that increasingly includes a build-back-better resilience uplift. BBB recovery evaluation then assesses whether the reconstruction actually delivered that uplift against its principles and baseline. In effect, needs assessment plans and budgets resilient recovery up front, while BBB evaluation audits the resilience that recovery produced, closing the loop between planning and accountability.
Sources
- 1.Mannakkara, S., Wilkinson, S., & Potangaroa, R. (2014). Build back better: implementation in Victorian bushfire reconstruction. Disasters, 38(2), 267-290.
- 2.GFDRR, European Union, United Nations Development Group (2013). Post-Disaster Needs Assessments Guidelines, Volume A. Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, World Bank.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Build Back Better Recovery Evaluation. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/disaster-studies/build-back-better-recovery-evaluation