An increasing number of natural disasters and deficiencies in recovery projects have emerged recently and necessitated the creation of versatile guidelines to achieve successful Post-Natural Disaster Recovery (PNDR) projects. Although some criteria have been set to measure these PNDR projects’ success, this topic needs further investigation. The solution may be extensive studies offering a holistic explanation for PNDR projects’ success. This paper creates a comprehensive continual cycle to illustrate these projects’ objectives. Subsequently, subsets or influential elements of the defined objectives can be recognized. Recently, several attempts have been made to apply System Thinking to construct a framework of the influential factors in a successful PNDR project; however, there is little focus in the previous works on identifying all the influential elements. This study can be separated into two parts; the first involves context analysis, which is applied to numerous resources coded by NVivo 2020 and several codes derived from five subsystems. Subsequently, the identified factors within the PNDR projects’ life cycle are analyzed twice, and the existing interrelationships are found out. The factors’ redundancy is examined, and among the 59 final factors, an objective-based categorization is performed. The time-based objectives, known as Primary Success Factors (PSFs), and their subsets/influential parameters are lastly illustrated and used to structure the identification and measurement of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for future research.

There is an ample amount of studies attempting to evaluate the success of recovery projects. However, they mostly focused on unilateral success indicators and ignored the continual lifespan and various stakeholders. This study has focused on addressing these obstacles by proposing a comprehensive success evaluation framework for recovery projects following socio-natural disasters through identifying the success dimensions and their effectual parameters. Triangulation of the results of quantitative and qualitative methods and the logic of qualitative comparative analysis were used to answer the research questions. System thinking and the concept of resiliency and sustainability, known as key performance indicators, structured the success measurements. The effectual elements on the success, critical success factors, were grouped according to the continuous life-cycle of these projects. Finally, the framework for success evaluation of socio-natural disaster recovery projects illustrates interactions among the deducted critical success factors and key performance indicators. The proposed framework may serve as more efficient guidelines to set and follow the recovery goals, comprehensively considering a wide range of stakeholders and long-term recovery. The results of this study can be subject to further research by using different methods to enhance the comprehensivity of the framework. The authors will conduct further research to verify the suggested framework by implementing case studies.

Although recent studies have provided explanations for the causes of success and failure in recovery projects following socio-natural disasters, there is a need for a concise understanding of how different combinations of factors may contribute to recovery failure or success. In this study, to examine the community recovery pathways after the 2003 Bam earthquake, we conducted a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 11 neighborhoods in Bam city and Baravat (the neighborhoods represent the division of the areas damaged by the earthquake, as presented by local government). The success of socio-natural disaster recovery projects is presented in three pathways in which the absence or presence of public engagement had a significant influence on the results. The results indicate that a recovery project should respond to the needs of the project within the continuous lifecycle of the project. Additionally, on the one hand, public participation and prompt rescue operations have a significant effect on project success. On the other hand, neglecting the needs of people and the area’s climate in housing design have led to project failure. It is expected that the findings from this study can be used to develop strategies for empowering people in recovery projects and to develop housing guidelines that respect residents’ needs while focusing on on-time and sufficient rescue processes. However, care should be taken when applying the present findings in practice, because every socio-natural disaster is unique and requires careful consideration of complex sets of features.