While there has been much discussion in international disaster management literature in recent years of the need to give affected communities much more ‘ownership’ of recovery and rehabilitation pro-jects and programs, there is little real understanding of what this might mean in practice. There are many calls for post-disaster recovery programs to reduce vulnerability to future risks, or to ‘build back better’. Drawing from an intense study of social recovery and community rebuilding across five tsunami-affected local areas in Sri Lanka and southern India, this article affirms the need for greater community ‘guidance’ of disaster recovery but it argues that different forms of community engagement are required for different stages in the long process from relief to recovery. It argues that ‘build back better’ is possible, but only if aid and other related agencies work more closely with existing capacities for resilience within the affected communities and contribute towards their legitimacy.