The researchers say that more than 500 aid agencies participated in the relief work in Sri Lanka alone, but many did not have experience in recovery after such a large-scale disaster, in which 230,000 people were killed in 14 countries.

The 385-page study says more care should have been devoted to the construction of temporary housing, because some of the resulting shelters housed families for up to four years, The Australian reported.

Martin Mulligan, director of RMIT's Globalism Research Centre and co-leader with Yaso Nadarajah, said unless governments and non-government organisations absorbed the lessons from the tsunami, "they will continue to repeat the same mistakes and waste a significant amount of global aid money".

He said examples of effective aid tended to be found where international NGOs formed strong partnerships with local community groups to ensure the aid was properly targeted.

"But we also found that a lot of post-tsunami aid money was wasted by aid agencies acting in haste, and in competition with each other," he said.

It says wastage resulted in part from "pressure from government, media and international funding bodies for quick results".

"In Sri Lanka, competitive aid agencies were often in a rush to complete the construction of new houses and settlements," it says.

The report lambasts "unimaginative, barrack-type" layouts for temporary housing and a "one-size-fits-all" approach, while praising a flexible template devised by World Vision.

It says: "Many agencies are reluctant to accept responsibility, despite so much evidence of poor construction."

The report says "only a community development strategy, rather than an asset replacement strategy, can give substance to the notion of 'build back better'."

World Vision chief executive Tim Costello said responding to the Boxing Day tsunami had been difficult and chaotic.

"That's how emergencies are," he said. "You just have to look at the complexity of the response to the Victorian bushfires last year to see the problems that can arise. We have teams whose sole responsibility is gathering the lessons from every emergency response, and asking 'how can we do this better?' "(DM)