Exclusion as a Defining Feature of Post-Disaster Recovery: Key Perspectives from Brazil

Abstract

This study critically interrogates dominant models of post-disaster recovery by combining an interdisciplinary review of critical scholarship with grounded empirical analysis from Brazil. It focuses on landless and unhoused populations, as well as residents of informal settlements, to explore how disaster recovery frameworks, rather than reducing vulnerability, often reproduce spatial inequality and deepen exclusion. The research draws on a multi‐site, multi‐temporal mixed-methods study conducted in collaboration with the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), analyzing Brazil’s most severe recent climate‐related disasters: landslides and floods in Petrópolis (2011, 2022, 2024) and São Sebastião (2023). Fieldwork involved participant observation, over 200 semistructured interviews with affected residents and officials, and 110 completed questionnaires. Findings reveal that Brazil’s disaster governance framework embeds exclusionary dynamics, privileging legally recognized property owners while marginalizing those without formal tenure. Recovery programs often simplify complex social realities through rigid eligibility criteria, thereby silencing diverse lived experiences. As a result, recovery often becomes a prolonged, secondary disaster for the most vulnerable. The article argues that prevailing recovery models, anchored in technocratic management and depoliticized resilience discourse, fail to address the structural roots of marginalization. By centering the role of grassroots movements such as MAB, this article highlights how collective action can expose recovery injustices and foster more inclusive, participatory, and transformative approaches to disaster governance.

Keywords

Climate disaster / Decolonial studies / Marginalized groups / Post-disaster recovery / Public policies / Social exclusion

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