ABSTRACT
Recovering from a disaster involves different decisions as disaster managers and long-term planners respond to the myriad of cascading problems. Disaster decision-making is typically posed as a series of dilemmas, for example: balancing short term and long term needs, speed or deliberation or focusing on restoration or reform. This chapter envisages these dilemmas as meta-decisions. It begins by defining resilience, recovery and meta decisions and describing how these terms are used in relation to disasters. The chapter argues that meta decision-making is a factor in the speed and quality of post-event recovery and contributes to the future resilience of vulnerable places. It explores the effect of meta-decisions in guiding recovery and suggests that better recovery is achieved by striking a balance between the opposing strategies implied in meta decision-making. Recovery seemed to be quicker and better in countries with both strong leadership and citizen involvement.
