Participation for disaster resilience: A life cycle approach to reconstruction projects in India

India has made progressive policy commitments towards enhancing community participation in post-disaster reconstruction; however, on-ground participation remains patchy. The cause of concern is the short timeframe for which the so-called veterans of reconstruction practitioners - the civil society organisations (CSOs) - gets to engage with the communities. Due to the constraints of time and money for reconstruction, CSOs tend to foresee participation for enhancing technical resilience of houses. Rarely do CSOs get an opportunity to engage with communities for a longer time-frame, to be able to address socio-economic vulnerabilities alongside technical ones. In addition, participation is easier said than done; indeed engagement in post-disaster context is always fraught due to imbalances of power between disaster survivors and CSOs. Time and again the opportunity presented by reconstruction for going beyond rebuilding of houses to rebuilding of communities, is lost. This chapter addresses the question of how, or what approaches to participation are most likely to empower or enhance resilience of communities in the long term. Four 'good practice' case study reconstruction projects - two from each Indian state of Gujarat and Bihar are compared to show the impact of different participatory approaches in the long-term. Based on the empirical findings, a new framework to operationalize community participation during reconstruction is derived for CSOs to put into practice for enhanced engagement and disaster-resilience outcomes. The framework considers strategic issues that go beyond one project life cycle understanding; to transition from the enhancement of trust and shared aims (social resilience), to housing reconstruction (technical/ physical resilience), to capacity building and the diversification of livelihoods (financial resilience).