Natural Disaster and International Development

Abstract

Recovery from natural disaster has for many years been seen in objective terms as simply the time taken to replace damaged infrastructure. Increasingly, however, social scientists are describing the large part that human capital plays in the recovery from natural disaster in the form of 'resilience'. The purpose of the chapter is to delineate, from a social scientific perspective, the main factors involved in disaster rehabilitation from a necessarily superficial but nevertheless accurate and useful viewpoint. The main areas to be considered are infrastructural impacts, psychological impacts and communication factors. The chapter concludes by defining various perspectives that contribute to the quality of resilience that underscores the investment in human capital in post-disaster zones.