There are many strategies and models that attempt to measure the impacts and losses from environmental crises. However, there remains a conceptual and methodological bias as assessments provide estimates of tangible and quantifiable indicators, whilst impact to intangible resources that are not easily quantifiable remain a significant oversight in disaster studies more specifically, and sustainability research more broadly. In this paper we use in-depth longitudinal qualitative data to theoretically and empirically demonstrate how intangible resources shape people's experience of so-called "natural" disasters. Building on this, we critically unpack how intangible resources facilitate household disaster recovery. We focus on home -an intangible resource -in order to explore these issues. The case study in Puerto Rico shows that the social characteristics of home are challenged, transformed, and/or exacerbated in different ways, and at different times, in post-disaster contexts.Our longitudinal approach reveals how people's feelings of belonging and attachment, alienation and detachment from home, fluctuate over time. In this way, the paper sheds light on how intangible resources are experienced temporally and spatially. The paper also reveals that the performance of actors such as the State and Nongovernmental organisations significantly shape how intangible resources such as home are transformed, and households' agency to maintain and recover such intangibles in post-disaster contexts. The analysis directly challenges the skewed and reductive hierarchies of what counts as a disaster loss. This is an innately political endeavour because it aims to develop strategic decision-making, from preparedness to recovery, that is sustainable for affected populations.

Much of the resilience literature myopically focuses on actors' responses to exogenous hazards, implicitly suggesting that resilient actors are merely adapting, mitigating, or recovering from a hazard (Chandler, 2012). This strips actors of their political agency and reduces actions to no more than survival and coping (Bohle et al., 2009). However, recent scholarship has explored the political potential of resilient actors by focusing on the connection between resilience and resistance (

Resilience has become the dominant and normative ideology of sustainability more generally, and disaster recovery more specifically. Most studies focus on how to achieve resilient recovery. This is premised on an assumption that resilience meets the needs and concerns of disaster-affected populations and is thereby sustainable. However, this article critically explores to what extent the recovery needs and concerns of disaster-affected households fit neatly within resilience vernacular and analytical frameworks. The research shows that resilience is informed by a reductive understanding of human needs as many socio-cultural needs of disaster-affected people are marginalized from resilience-based recovery. The article suggests that if disaster recovery is to be a normative and sustainable agenda, then resilience alone may be insufficient, and that needs and concerns that do not directly adapt to, reduce or avoid the impacts of hazards, ought to be prioritized in recovery programmes. The article explores these issues by investigating self-build housing processes in a post-disaster setting in Cochabamba city in Bolivia.

Aid partnerships between global north and global south institutions are critiqued for maintaining colonial knowledge politics and restricting the participation of southern development experts. This paper draws on lifework interviews with senior civil servants within the Antigua and Barbuda government to explore how southern development experts subvert the development hierarchies that permeate partnership micropolitics. The paper first reveals how southern development experts draw on their experiences and normative discourses of ‘local knowledge’ to dismantle assumptions that whiteness and ‘westerness’ symbolise expertise in partnerships. Second, southern development experts engage in small-scale acts of everyday resistance to assert their expertise and decentre the authority and knowledge of foreign consultants. Everyday resistance allows this paper to reveal southern experts’ personal agency and subtle forms of resistance, which Foucauldian analyses of power and ‘spectacular’ theories of resistance are unequipped to recognise. I suggest that the racialised and geographic hierarchies, which structure power and privilege in the micro-level encounters between donors and beneficiaries are not as entrenched as we may think.