Auditing post-disaster recovery as land-use governance: Public investment after the 2024 floods in the Valencian Region, Spain

Post-disaster recovery is usually reported through aggregate budgets, obscuring which resources have reached an administratively consolidated stage, where they materialise, and which interventions operate beyond municipal boundaries. This study develops a reproducible ex post territorial audit of awarded public recovery investment after the 29 October 2024 floods in the Valencian Region, Spain. We reconcile 1647 procurement records closed on 28 February 2026 into published, awarded, municipally territorialised and non-municipalisable recovery states, and combine the municipal component with rainfall, flooded area, estimated affected population and water depth for 106 municipalities. Concentration measures, Moran’s I, Local Indicators of Spatial Association, Pearson and Spearman correlations, and a relative territorial adequacy indicator assess concentration, spatial clustering and proportional alignment without estimating causal allocation effects. Of EUR 3.241 billion published, EUR 1.454 billion had been awarded; EUR 1.157 billion was territorialised and EUR 297.42 million (20.45% of awards) remained non-municipalisable. Territorialised investment was highly concentrated (Gini = 0.763; top 15 municipalities = 72.57%) and spatially structured (Moran’s I = 0.420). It was more strongly associated with flooded area and estimated affected population than with rainfall. Among 66 municipalities retained for adequacy analysis, 23 were under-covered, 12 approximately proportional and 31 over-covered. The contribution is a scale-aware audit architecture that separates administrative recovery states and distinguishes concentration, clustering and alignment, preventing network-scale investment from being omitted or arbitrarily localised. The findings support georeferenced recovery registers, beneficiary-area coding and exposure-sensitive ex post review.