Technologies of reconstruction

Highlights

Post-disaster and post-conflict reconstruction have generated a substantial body of scholarly and professional knowledge, yet this knowledge remains dispersed across disciplines, institutions, professional practices and individual reconstruction episodes. Reconstruction policy operates within a large but fragmented knowledge environment. To examine the organisation of the field, this special issue considers the complexity of such an environment, characterised not only by the number of problems it encompasses but also by the relationships between separate processes and diverse actors operating across different spatial and temporal scales. The special issue confirms both the value and the limitations of disciplinary specialisation: increasingly sophisticated knowledge of particular reconstruction problems has not necessarily produced an integrated understanding of reconstruction as a whole. Rather than seeking unification through a universal model, a dialectical composition of different forms of knowledge is proposed within a common conceptual structure. Recovering an older meaning of technology as the systematic organisation of knowledge concerning practical action, it considers the possibility of a ‘technology of reconstruction’. It concludes by exploring how an open ontology of reconstruction, supported by computational methods and artificial intelligence, might enable accumulated empirical experience to become systematically comparable while preserving disciplinary difference and contextual specificity. The development of an internationally governed, open ontology of reconstruction is proposed: a shared framework for describing reconstruction processes, actors, resources, decisions, relationships and outcomes while preserving contextual differences. Existing recovery institutions could provide the organisational basis for developing and testing such a framework. The immediate policy priority is the knowledge infrastructure required to make accumulated reconstruction experience collectively usable.