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With the recognition of the necessity for effectively and successfully managing natural disaster projects for saving human lives and preventing and minimizing the impacts of disasters on socio‐economic developmental progress, this paper seeks to propose a balanced scorecard (BSC) approach in order to maximize the possibilities of desired outcomes from projects.

The BSC approach, which has been widely accepted and used in business organizations, can be adapted for natural disaster management projects. An application of this BSC approach to disaster management projects is discussed with a real flood disaster management project.

In the BSC approach, performance measures should be established in four areas: donors' perspective; the target beneficiaries' perspective; the internal process perspective; and the learning and innovation perspectives. Measures for four areas in each of the five generic phases of managing natural disasters (i.e. preparedness, early warning, emergency relief, rehabilitation and recovery) allow project managers to identify problem areas and areas for further improvements. Ensuring success in one phase will lead to success in the subsequent phase because success in one phase will be the input for the following phase.

In general, this study demonstrates an application of the balanced scorecard approach to natural disaster management projects and, in particular, to a real flood disaster management in Hat Yai Municipality, Southern Thailand. Future research might focus on other types of natural disaster.

Using the balanced scorecard, project managers can understand problem areas as well as areas for improvement in current projects, which would enhance their abilities to take corrective actions that ensure and maximize the possibilities of successful outcomes from implemented projects.

This paper proposes the BSC approach for successfully managing natural disaster projects. This management approach can be applied to various natural disaster management projects.