Conventional disaster recovery often prioritizes rapid restoration to a baseline state but potentially perpetuates pre-existing vulnerabilities that neglect long-term resilience. Unlike current approaches that emphasize physical and economic rebuilding with a blind eye to the previous context of disasters, Reformative Recovery (RR) highlights the need to intervene in social and environmental long-term processes leading to vulnerability. This paper advances the concept of 'Reformative Recovery' and proposes an analytical framework as a sense-making tool to guide interpretation of recovery dynamics by foregrounding the conditions that foster vulnerability and impede long-term resilience. RR reframes recovery as a continuous and non-linear process shaped by social and institutional dynamics. The analytical framework is developed through a systematic scoping review and structured around six dimensions relevant for RR: 1) social justice, 2) governance arrangements, 3) community and culture, 4) financial mechanisms, 5) built environment, and 6) critical services. As an extension to the state of the art, a social justice dimension is proposed as an overarching component. Furthermore, the concept of critical services is extended beyond networked infrastructures to include locally defined essential services. These dimensions reflect the complex and interconnected nature of disaster impacts. For each dimension, we propose diagnostic prompts to support critical assessment of conditions and potential for inclusive and just post-disaster recovery by means of reformation. Rather than prescriptive indicators, these prompts serve as deliberative tools to support reflective and context-sensitive use by decision-makers and researchers. RR can be used to bridge short-term actions with long-term resilience-building in diverse contexts.
Augustinus et al. (2026) studied this question.