Building Disaster Recovery Institutions through South-South Policy Transfer: A Comparative Case Study of Indonesia and Haiti

Since the humanitarian response to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, there has been a
growing body of literature on quality and accountability in humanitarian action. One
of the most recent trends has been a focus on ‘humanitarian cooperation’ between
the governments of disaster affected countries and other humanitarian actors. The
research presented in this book builds on this trend by comparing two governmental
recovery agencies, namely the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the
Aceh Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (BRR).
Through a review of the literature on policy transfer, the creation of an integrated
conceptual/analytical framework for policy transfer and the application of Lijphart’s
‘comparative method’, the research attempts to identify both whether or not policy
transfer occurred between the two contexts, as well as the possible causes for the
difference in both agencies’ ability to ‘build back better’. The outcomes of the research
are then used to suggest possible areas of future research and related hypotheses.