Recovery as an Opportunity for Systemic Change. Emerging Transformative Recovery Field? A Scoping Review and Critical Interpretive Synthesis Protocol

Major disruptions such as disasters, conflicts, pandemics, and environmental crises are increasingly framed as “windows of opportunity” to pursue broader societal change rather than merely restore pre-existing conditions. Across disaster risk reduction, resilience studies, climate adaptation, sustainability transitions, post-conflict reconstruction, development studies, and political ecology, scholars and practitioners have proposed that recovery processes can reduce vulnerabilities, improve governance, reconfigure socio-technical systems, advance justice, and support sustainability transformations. Despite this growing interest, the literature remains fragmented across disciplinary traditions and conceptual vocabularies. This protocol outlines a scoping review combined with a Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) that will systematically examine how recovery is framed as an opportunity for systemic change following major disruptions. The review aims to identify key concepts, disciplinary traditions, normative orientations, mechanisms, enabling conditions, and barriers associated with recovery-oriented change. The study will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and will be reported according to the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Searches will be conducted in Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection. Findings will contribute to theoretical integration across fragmented literatures and assess whether an emerging interdisciplinary field can be identified.