A Research Agenda to Inform Post-Disaster Transformative Adaptation

Despite the tragic nature of disasters, they may create opportunities for transformative change. Even so, we see more conservative policies adopted post-disaster, retracting, or even blocking more daring, transformative actions with potential to radically shape social, ecological, and economic infrastructures and build resilience. Therefore, it is imperative to examine the mechanisms for how transformative change can emerge after a disaster. This is especially urgent given the escalating frequency and intensity of disasters resulting from worsening climate change. However, despite extensive research on how the effects of disasters may trigger cross-sectoral local adaptation in the sense of transformative change, the governance, organisational and political mechanisms, and processes that shape reorganizing patterns, remains poorly understood. This has meant adaptation and learning from disasters remain primarily reactive, event-driven, short-term, mitigation-focused, sector-specific, thus rarely delivering adaptive and transformative outcomes. This Perspective draws on scarce evidence on the topic and outlines the current understanding and conceptual framing of post-disaster transformative adaptation. Based on this, we identify research questions to shape a research agenda and address current shortcomings. We frame our commentary in terms of resilience thinking, the lens of sustainability transitions, and focus on the learning mechanism of experimentation. We argue that a better understanding of opportunities and mechanisms for achieving transformative change will increase the adaptive capacity to build resilience and reduce disaster risks.