Application of System Thinking and Factors Interrelationship Analysis to Identify Primary Success Factors of Post-Natural Disaster Recovery Projects

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.