The difference between flood relief and genuine flood recovery

With floodwaters receded across Sri Lanka after Cyclone Ditwah, one of the worst disasters since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the country faces the daunting task of recovery. More than the rainfall itself, the pressing question is how vulnerable the nation is when the next floods come.

The 2025 floods are not an anomaly. They are part of a familiar cycle in countries like Sri Lanka: intense rainfall, widespread displacement, rapid humanitarian response, followed by fading political attention, dwindling funding, and weakened coordination. Each time, communities are rebuilt just enough to cope, but not enough to be safer.

Recent doctoral research conducted under my supervision examined post-disaster recovery in Sri Lanka and other developing countries. The findings revealed that recovery rarely fails because of emergency response. It fails in the transition: the handover from relief to long-term rebuilding. These lessons are not unique to developing contexts; they can apply to any country grappling with disaster recovery, including New Zealand.

The critical gap between relief and rebuilding

Flood recovery unfolds over years, moving from immediate response to medium-term recovery, and finally to long-term reconstruction and development. What consistently undermines this process is a lack of planning for how one phase ends and the next begins.

In Sri Lanka, early response is often strong: rescues, temporary shelters, and relief distribution. But as humanitarian agencies withdraw and national attention shifts, responsibility is transferred, often abruptly, to local authorities that are under-resourced and underprepared.

This transition is where recovery unravels. Data, institutional memory, and community knowledge gathered during response phases are often lost. Recovery plans exist on paper but are not implemented. Funding dries up just as rebuilding decisions become most consequential. The result: incomplete housing, stalled infrastructure, and communities resettled without livelihoods, services, or protection from future floods.

Three priorities for a better recovery

Our research highlights three priorities to avoid repeating past mistakes:

Clarify recovery governance early. Who leads six months from now? Who holds authority once emergency powers end? Without clear leadership and timelines, recovery becomes fragmented, with agencies working in silos and no accountability for long-term outcomes.
Engage communities beyond consultation. Affected communities are often asked for input during needs assessments but excluded from decisions on housing, relocation, or infrastructure. The result: technically sound but socially unworkable solutions, such as homes that people can’t afford to maintain, livelihoods disconnected from place, or resettlements that increase vulnerability.

Invest in local capacity where recovery happens. Long-term recovery sits with local government, yet local authorities are rarely resourced, trained, or empowered to manage large-scale rebuilding. Without deliberate investment, “building back better” is a slogan rather than reality.

Recovery missteps

Past recoveries offer clear warnings. Treating recovery as a series of isolated projects rather than a connected process risks fragmentation. Letting donor priorities dictate timelines can result in rushed handovers and unfinished work. And declaring recovery “complete” too early can undermine long-term development. Development is what ultimately prevents the next disaster from being worse.

Sri Lanka has seen this cycle before. After the 2016–2017 floods, recovery was hampered by practical and governance challenges. Authorities struggled to find suitable safer land for relocating displaced communities, particularly in a land-scarce country. In Kalutara, cultural concerns and the lack of community involvement in site choice added to the difficulties. New houses were often built far from people’s livelihoods, prompting many to eventually return to their original, high-risk lands.

Multiple ministries oversaw reconstruction with little coordination and limited data management, while capacity and skill shortages prevented disaster-resilient measures from being fully implemented. Political interference caused the failure of a key resilience project run by an international NGO, and multi-ethnic resettlements further complicated recovery. With infrastructure restored but systemic risks unaddressed, vulnerability quietly returned alongside homes and roads.

A narrow window of opportunity

Post-disaster recovery offers a rare window to address structural problems that are otherwise politically and financially difficult to fix; but the window is short.

If Sri Lanka (or any country) treats flood recovery as more than emergency relief, plans explicitly for transitions between response, recovery, and long-term development, and invests in local capacity, it can reduce the human and economic cost of the next flood. Without real change, each recovery is just setting the stage for the next disaster.

My recently commenced research, funded by Building Research Association of New Zealand, explores these issues further by trying to understand the facilitators and barriers to household flood resilience. Understanding what enables or prevents households and local councils from reducing flood risk highlights the practical steps that can make recovery more effective and ensure that communities are safer, rather than vulnerable, after the next flood.