ABSTRACT
The general aim of the survey is to determine whether the focus had adopted in this book is widely shared. The responses suggest that the community of disaster recovery specialists has well and truly espoused the idea that creating resilience should be a 'bounce forward' not a 'bounce back' process; in other words, one that focuses on eliminating future vulnerability. It is clear that successful recovery from disaster is seen to be a holistic process, but one that has many facets and hence can be subtle and complicated. One important challenge of reconstruction is to preserve beign cultural values while helping those that foster vulnerability to change for the better. The literature on disaster recovery clearly indicates how important it is to consider gender, given the enhanced vulnerability of women to disaster impact, their vital function in keeping families together and the reality that their specific needs are often neglected in recovery operations.
