This article contributes to scholarship on innovative humanitarian finance by examining the application of impact bonds-an outcome-based financing mechanism where investors fund projects upfront and are repaid with interest if they succeed. Amid consistent funding shortfalls, impact bonds were framed as a radical transformation in how aid can be financed and delivered. By sharing financial risk with investors and linking payment to results, they were meant to attract private capital and enhance aid effectiveness. However, this study reveals a gap between the expectations and realities of impact bonds through case studies of two pilots: the Humanitarian Impact Bond (International Committee of the Red Cross); and the Refugee Impact Bond (Near East Foundation). In practice, impact bonds did not generate additional funds for the humanitarian sector, transfer significant risk to investors, or outperform traditionally financed programmes. The article therefore underscores the need for a rigorous evaluation of new financing mechanisms before adoption.

Disaster risk can be produced through governance processes that operate before hazards occur. The role of land tenure recognition in them remains undertheorised. This study examines how uneven institutional translation of tenure recognition may shape pre-hazard disaster risk in legally plural settings. A qualitative policy instrument analysis compares two South African National Housing Code programmes using institutional mapping, thematic coding, and abductive reasoning. Both programmes reveal conditional recognition, in which occupation gains institutional standing without equivalent integration across planning, infrastructure, and disaster risk governance. The Recognition Gap Governance and Disaster Risk Framework identifies cross-institutional translation, diffused spatial risk accountability, and institutional bricolage as interrelated governance dynamics through which exposure may become embedded. This shifts analytical attention from post-hazard response to the institutional processes that produce vulnerability and exposure before hazards materialise. Disaster risk reduction should engage earlier and more coherently with the governance of land use recognition and settlement development.

Since the 1990s, fragility has been used to describe low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with limited ability to respond to external threats in ways that ensure citizen safety, security, and welfare. Fragility challenges us to engage with governance, including why and how many institutions (including those in high-income countries) fail to protect citizens during climate change. We ask the question: how can state fragility be applied, critiqued, and expanded when considering climate change, including anthropogenic drivers, extreme weather events, mitigation, and adaptation? We present a globally applicable framework of governance fragility and emphasise the role of institutional-level gaps in motivation/willingness to act, evidence uptake, and implementation in creating fragilities that inhibit climate resilience. Using the United States as a case study, we apply the framework to identify the political ideologies that inform institutional-level motivations, shape evidence uptake, and moderate implementation capacity. This expanded notion of governance fragility (beyond conflict-affected LMICs) offers a globally-relevant lens to imagine possible solutions, including a research-to-practice agenda that contends both with ideology/willingness to act and decentralised forms of climate governance in the face of national-level fragilities.

This study explores the institutional, professional, and social responses to the gender-based violence that occurred in the wake of the 2021 volcanic eruption in La Palma, Spain. Using a qualitative methodology, it analyses the perspectives of 46 stakeholders-political decision-makers, technical staff, and social activists-acquired through in-depth interviews. The findings reveal that gender-based violence was initially overlooked during the crisis as emergency actions prioritised general safety and housing. The absence of gender-sensitive planning increased the vulnerability of women, particularly those already at risk. Although institutional efforts were later redirected to strengthen specialised services, the system remained strained owing to inadequate coordination, a lack of specific protocols, and insufficient professional training, reflecting a reactive, fragmented, and sector-specific approach. The study also highlights significant discrepancies between stakeholder groups, linked to their roles within the disaster management system. It underlines the urgent need for early-stage gender mainstreaming in disaster preparedness and response, including tailored protocols, continuous training of frontline personnel, and inter-institutional coordination.

This paper critically examines livelihood recovery in the peripheral resettlement sites of Chennai, India, following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Despite the implementation of various gender-inclusive livelihood programmes as a part of disaster recovery, our longitudinal empirical research reveals a persistent gap between formal recovery measures and the everyday conditions required for livelihoods to become gender-inclusive and sustainable over time. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, we explore how women respond in the long term to these limitations: not simply through individual coping strategies but also by developing and maintaining collective, care-centred practices, including adapting domestic spaces to work, sharing childcare responsibilities, and building networks of mutual support. These practices are often invisible in official recovery frameworks, yet they serve as critical choices for women both to sustain their livelihoods and perform their care roles. We build on Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher's (1990) theory of caring to conceptualise these acts as forms of 'caring with', where care becomes a collective, political, and relational response to systemic exclusion. In doing so, we reposition disaster recovery not merely as a return to normalcy or economic productivity but also as a deeply social and gendered process that is shaped by care and solidarity.

Compound crises have attracted growing interest from scholars and policymakers in recent years. Little attention, however, has been directed to the social relations that emerge from and respond to such phenomena. This paper closes the gap by investigating the emergence, impact, and limitations of the civic ecosystem that responded to the earthquakes in northwest Syria in 2023, an area already affected by protracted armed conflict, mass displacement, and humanitarian emergency. We combine ideas from complex adaptive systems theory, civic ecosystems scholarship, and the literature on compound crises to analyse primary data and evidence collected through key informant interviews, a focus group discussion, and participatory observation. The paper contends that compound crises present distinctive challenges and opportunities that civic ecosystems are particularly adept at addressing and exploiting. We show how they evolve through adaptive cycles of learning and innovation across multiple co-occurring shocks. One implication of the argument is the need to apply systems theory to understand how systems can tackle, rather than only produce, complex social problems such as compound crises.

This article examines humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip as a system in which access to survival is structured under conditions of prolonged siege. Focusing on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, as a recent and concentrated example of securitised aid delivery, it develops the concept of calibrated survival governance to explain how access to life-sustaining resources is organised through spatial concentration, administrative procedures, and securitised delivery systems. The study uses these sources to pinpoint recurring patterns across civilian experience, practitioner accounts, expert interpretation, and documentary evidence, rather than claiming statistical representativeness. The findings identify four interrelated mechanisms shaping access to survival: multi-sectoral deprivation; risk-conditioned access to aid; bureaucratic regulation of availability; and militarised organisation of delivery. The article argues that these patterns are not fully captured by explanations centred only on logistical breakdown, scarcity, or institutional dysfunction. While such factors remain important, the Gaza case shows how humanitarian systems can also operate as infrastructures that mediate who can access assistance, where, when, and under what conditions. By conceptualising these dynamics as calibrated survival governance, the article contributes to scholarship on humanitarian power, access, and siege governance, and offers a framework for analysing aid in protracted, siege-like environments beyond Gaza.

Existing research on civilian rescue teams (CRTs) has predominantly focused on their roles in and contributions to disaster governance, with comparatively limited attention paid to their own development and organisational capacity building (OCB). Strengthening OCB is essential for CRT development through the integration of internal resources and external support. Drawing on resource dependence theory and the resource-based view, this study develops an integrated theoretical framework to examine OCB in CRTs. Using descriptive statistics and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the study analyses data from 816 teams across China through a national survey. The findings yield two key insights. First, the descriptive analysis documents substantial variation in the geographical distribution, organisational scale, and network integration of CRTs, providing the empirical context for examining their heterogeneous capacity building configurations. Second, and more significantly, the fsQCA results show that high OCB arises from configurations of internal and external resources. Some conditions are substitutable, whereas professional competence remains the core condition for absorbing and converting external resources into OCB. This research contributes to the literature on OCB in disaster management and offers practical implications for strengthening the development of CRTs.

The humanitarian sector has been challenging power relationships between international and local actors for decades, attempting to move towards a mode of operation where local knowledge and capacity are central. The sector is thus striving to promote a more inclusive approach to aid delivery through localisation. Existing literature largely focuses on power imbalances between international and local actors. However, power imbalances among local actors can also undermine localisation efforts, meaning that affected communities do not always support or benefit from a shift in power to national and local actors. In this paper, we present a most-different case comparison of the refugee response in Turkey and the Hurricane Maria response in Dominica, drawing on 110 interviews. We argue that dynamics of paternalism and politicisation among local actors in the same country can undermine localisation's goal of providing inclusive and needs-based assistance. When funders do not account for such dynamics, we posit, localisation can reinforce, rather than alleviate, inequality and marginalisation.

As nature-induced disasters intensify and reliance on volunteer support grows, volunteers are now increasingly critical to disaster response and recovery, particularly in countries like Australia. This paper advances our empirical understanding of volunteer contributions to long-term disaster recovery. The use of semi-structured interviews with volunteers who provide disaster recovery support, stakeholders who collaborate with volunteers, and individuals who received recovery support services from volunteers allowed us to identify effective approaches that resonated with and meaningfully aided disaster-affected people. To support individuals and families through the challenging and overwhelming recovery process, volunteers extended relational, compassionate, and agile support. By adopting a long-term perspective focused on housing recovery, rather than engaging in a crisis response role, volunteers were able to set and manage realistic expectations concerning service delivery. Volunteers utilised both their local connections and organisational links to collaborate and communicate, confirming the need to look at the broader context within which they operate.

This article explores how the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus (also known as the triple nexus) is operationalised, moving beyond policy discourse to implementation on the ground. Drawing on a systematic literature review, programme analysis, and field-based observation, it proposes three operational approaches to the HDP nexus, integrated, nexus-sensitive, and coordinated, which often appear in hybrid forms. Building on Paul Howe's (2019) 'bundles and arrays' framework, the typology moves the focus from individual project design to broader organisational strategies, institutional mandates, contextual realities, and trade-offs shaping nexus practice. The analysis situates this within a decade of nexus discourse and implementation, addressing current pressures such as shrinking aid budgets and the integration of climate and displacement agendas, while examining their implications for operational practice. Rather than pursuing a universal model, the paper argues that effective practice resists standardisation, emerging instead from negotiation across shifting mandates, evolving priorities, and diverse contexts, offering a typology to guide context-specific operational choices.

Rapid, reliable assessment of building damage immediately after an earthquake is essential for prioritising search and rescue, allocating scarce resources, and establishing early situational awareness. This study develops and evaluates a deep learning classifier that uses terrestrial images-which provide critical ground-level detail often missed by aerial or satellite views-to categorise buildings as not damaged, damaged, or collapsed. Trained on a curated corpus of post-event building images sourced from multiple earthquakes, a ResNet50-based model achieved 93.5 per cent overall accuracy in terms of validation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of fast, initial triage at building scale and serve to complement existing aerial/remote sensing workflows, including potential integration into crowdsourced and reconnaissance imagery streams. This approach offers a practical path to accelerating post-event decision support while recognising that finer-grained damage classification may be developed for later recovery phases, ultimately improving urban resilience and saving human lives during critical, time-sensitive operations in vulnerable, disaster-stricken communities.

Grassroots organisations (GOs) often emerge spontaneously in disaster contexts to fill gaps left by formal authorities, changing their structures and functions to meet evolving community needs. While prior research documents these transformations, it offers limited insight into why they occur and what they mean for disaster recovery. Social capital (SC) is critical for collective action, but its role in shaping grassroots organisational change remains underexplored. This study, examining community-based GOs in Taiwan following Typhoon Morakot in 2009, investigates how SC influences organisational change. Using a comparative case study design, it finds that bonding SC within communities was most closely associated with whether change was sustained. Alignment between the initiatives of GOs and community priorities mediated bonding SC, sustaining trust, reciprocity, and legitimacy. Bridging and linking SC supported access to resources and external legitimacy, but they were not sufficient on their own when local support weakened. Theoretically, the study clarifies how SC subtypes interact with organisational change and helps interpret what such changes signify. Practically, it underscores the importance of responsive community engagement while strategically leveraging bridging and linking SC in post-disaster recovery.