How does our approach to reconstruction need to change?

Our research into the long-term impact of reconstruction provided new learning, leading to some suggestions for future changes to reconstruction and recovery and our ways of working. We were also able to identify gaps where we need to broaden our understanding, perhaps through future research. However, it is worth noting again that our review of case studies was based on qualitative information only. Numbers interviewed in each case were relatively small, and, therefore, did not produce statistically viable quantitative evidence. As far as possible, we verified individually obtained information through triangulation. We also compared our findings with those of two parallel research efforts with a similar focus. That said we are aware that these case studies are looking back at reconstruction over a very variable timespan, ranging between 4 and 35 years, making comparison of long-term impact difficult even between them. Moreover, they took place in widely differing contexts, and every new crisis is bound to be different again. The positive lessons that have come out of this research will, therefore, always need to be adapted to new disaster situations. Bearing in mind these restrictions, we can see some of the findings from the literature reviewed in Chapter 1 confirmed in our case studies. Other literature findings are harder to verify, partly because our sample of cases may not have covered them sufficiently, but also because these findings may have been evident in the short-term impact and changed in the longer term, a phenomenon confirmed in the research by Duyne Barenstein in Chapter 3.