Communities throughout the world face escalating risks from hurricanes, earthquakes, many of which are intensified by climate change. Global housing stocks are disproportionately vulnerable to these risks, with losses that can permanently reverse decades of development. The ideal disaster risk reduction strategy, in which homeowners “build better before” disaster strikes, has proven challenging, making efforts to “build back better” after disasters more pragmatic, though still difficult. We examine how homeowner expectations of support shape resilient rebuilding after disasters and how their actions vary after earthquakes and hurricanes in one of the most challenging post-disaster contexts, Haiti.

 

Using novel survey data from homeowners in two comparable cities, Léogâne and Les Cayes, we analyze how variation in expectations surrounding sources of support for post-disaster rebuilding and their diversification shapes homeowners’ reconstruction decisions after the 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. We show that expectation of local community support promotes resilient rebuilding, whereas expectations of external financial support from government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and diaspora remittances, do not. Moreover, our results indicate that diversifying support for post-disaster rebuilding across multiple sources also encourages efforts to build back better. However, these findings hold for rebuilding only after earthquakes, not hurricanes, highlighting the unique vulnerabilities of recurring hazards. Our findings challenge arguments that aid expectations create a “chilling effect” and suggest that humanitarian-stage messaging tailored to the unique dynamics of each hazard can speed resilient rebuilding and that limited assistance funds can be better invested by reinforcing existing systems of mutual aid.