Administrative Production of Disaster Vulnerability: Explaining Persistent Infrastructure Vulnerability through Administrative Learning in the Himalayan Region

Public administrations in disaster-prone low- and middle-income countries face a persistent governance question: do institutions learn from one disaster to the next, or does experience fail to translate into revised policy and practice? This study addresses that question through the Administrative Production of Disaster Vulnerability (APDV), a policy-cycle framework tracing how vulnerability is reproduced or corrected across planning, budgeting, maintenance, and reconstruction, applied to Himachal Pradesh, India. PWD infrastructure damage across two successive monsoons (2023, 2025) correlates strongly across eleven districts (Pearson r = 0.819, p = 0.002; Spearman ρ = 0.882, p < 0.001), with Mandi and Shimla the highest-damage districts both years and state-wide damage rising 55.5% despite reconstruction spending. APDV distinguishes chronic vulnerability (Mandi, Shimla), a failure to convert risk into revised practice, from acute vulnerability (Chamba, Una), limited anticipatory capacity. Findings support district-specific resilience planning and identify administrative learning capacity as a distinct governance challenge.