Exploring Paradigm Shifts in Researching Long-Term Disaster Recovery

This editorial article introduces a Special Issue ‘Exploring Paradigm Shifts in Researching Long-Term Disaster Recovery’ and suggests future directions for research. For this issue, we called for multidisciplinary manuscripts addressing different aspects of long-term disaster recovery and risk reduction, encouraging the adoption of new lenses for exploring topics such as: challenging the apparent assumption of linearity between short- and long-term recovery lifecycles and promoting new frameworks to research long-term disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction. The questions we wanted to ask were: ‘what challenges do researchers face when studying long-term recovery? how does long-term recovery differ from short-term reconstruction? what types of leadership are elicited through recovery? and how could long-term disaster recovery be handled differently to bring better outcomes?’ This editorial is organised as follows. It initially presents the sheer complexity and challenges faced by researchers investigating long-term recovery, together with the different disciplinary approaches they have brought into this field of research. We then provide an overview of the research questions and findings of the seven contributing papers selected for this Special Issue of the journal. Finally, we suggest what we believe are the next steps in investigating long-term recovery to further develop this important field of research.