Water Sector Reconstruction for Post-disaster Housing Settlements: A Tale of Two Governance Models

The 2004 tsunami impacted coastal India resulting in thousands of mortalities and hundreds of thousands displaced. The aftermath elicited the largest reconstruction effort in India’s history. This study investigates reconstruction in the adjacent territories of Nagapattinam District (Tamil Nadu) and Karaikal District (Puducherry). While both territories deployed virtually identical public–private partnership frameworks consisting of Memoranda of Understandings between the governments and humanitarian organizations, the models deployed to manage reconstruction differed. In Nagapattinam, a collaborative model was executed in which various public agencies were responsible for their respective reconstruction activities. Meanwhile, Karaikal exercised a single agency model under which a standalone public agency assumed responsibility for reconstruction activities. By linking primary data to the theoretical literature, this study examines outcomes of the two governance models through the lens of water. In this case, findings suggest that the collaborative approach—while seemingly more holistic and participatory—produced inferior outcomes due to issues of coordination, bureaucratic layering, and project organization. This outcome, which is incongruent with many theories on governance, development, and project management, is problematized and discussed as are strategies to better integrate the water sector into disaster and urban planning.