Improving Housing Resilience through Disaster Knowledge Management (DKM) Assessment

The application of best practices in disaster construction knowledge is a means of significantly improving housing resilience. This is essential to support a transition from vulnerability toward resilience. Nevertheless, there are currently recognised standards for best practices in rural construction. Due to a lack of expertise in Disaster Knowledge Management (DKM), Pakistan has a significant barrier to implementing safe building practices in construction activities, thereby, its efforts to strengthen its disaster resilience, particularly with earthquakes. In this context, effective utilisation of available and feasible Knowledge Transfer (KT), particularly in rural areas, can help solve the need to construct long-term disaster-resilient housing. This research investigation identified that DKM is essential in capacity building and technical knowledge transmission relating to seismic guidelines to improve housing resilience. A theoretical framework was developed, focused primarily on the post-2005 rural reconstruction mechanism and identifying key challenges in disseminating seismic guidelines effectively to rural construction practices. The study examines the potential for improving housing resilience from a disaster knowledge perspective that effectively responds to the challenges of applying best building practice guidelines. The research utilises a pragmatic constructivism paradigm and a mixed-method research approach. An extensive field survey was conducted alongside separate expert interviews and empirical qualitative and quantitative data triangulation analysis.

The findings support the creation of a KT framework for rural housing construction as a significant means of disaster mitigation and recovery planning. The approach can assist rural communities in reducing losses and improving response and recovery, thereby improving housing resilience and lowering vulnerabilities. The research is intended to contribute usefully to dealing with future disaster situations in earthquake-prone regions. It aims to do so by suggesting how resilient and sustainable societies can be achieved through effective knowledge transmission management in organisations, institutions, communities, and local construction workers. This research seeks to make an original contribution by developing a DKM framework by identifying key challenges that need to be addressed to rural construction best practices, generally, but particularly in the Pakistan context.