Communities across the globediffer in history, culture, and beliefs; and these differences may help drive how communities process, learn from, and recover after a disaster. When faced with natural disasters, communities respond in diverse ways, with processes that reflect their cultures, needs, the type and extent of damage incurred and resources available to the community. Chapter 5 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience articulates the ways in which internal community characteristics influence the disaster recovery processes and decisions made by local governments. Prior disaster experience and damage from the most recent disaster, along with perceptions of problem severity and future risk perceptions can influence the degree to which residents view disasters as an increasing and urgent problem for their local governments to manage. Finally, local government information dissemination during disaster recovery can serve two important roles: (1) garnering support for local government action and trust in government decisions, along with (2) incorporating a range of views beyond only technocratic experts to build innovative policy solutions.

Chapter 2 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience examines the case of Colorado’s extreme floods of 2013, describing the event, damages, and the aftermath during the early weeks of disaster recovery.It sets the stage for subsequent chapters that empirically assess the disaster recovery processes and outcomes. The extreme flooding that occurred in Colorado in 2013 began with heavy rain from a stationary front, with the worst coming on September 11 and 12. The rivers along Colorado’s Front Range swelled from the storm beginning September 9. Flash flooding soon occurred in the narrow mountain canyons and communities, overwhelming communities nestled at the mouths of canyons. This floodwater then slowly moved east to the agricultural communities in the plains including Evans. Seventeen Colorado counties across nearly 200 miles (north to south) were affected by the flood event, for a total of 4,500 square miles.

In Chapter 3 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience, the disaster damage from Colorado's 2013 floods is examined. The extent and type of damage that communities experience during a disaster is linked to the recovery processes, resources, and outcomes that communities experience. Understanding the damage incurred by communities underlies the analysis presented in the rest of the book.

Chapter 10 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience builds upon the analyses presented in the prior chapters and applies those findings to other cases within and beyond the U.S. This chapter provides a broader foundation for the book’s argument that certain factors are important for disaster recovery and resilience-building at the community-scale beyond the book's focus on Colorado’s 2013 floods.Variation in disaster damage and internal capacity to fund and administer disaster recovery influences the ability of a community to learn from, change policies, and build resilience to future events. Internal community characteristics influence the disaster recovery processes and decisions made by local governments, including perceptions of problem severity and future risk perceptions, which are influenced by government information dissemination and participatory processes established after disaster. Additionally, the role of stakeholders in forming coalitions to advocate for disaster recovery goals can play important roles in the decision process after a disaster.

Chapter 11 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience concludes the book be presenting key lessons from the study and provides recommendations to practitioners and disaster scholars who are working towards greater community-resilience and learning so that communities can prepare for and withstand extreme events in the future.

Chapter 8 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience discusses the importance of relationships – with other governments and within a community – that can encourage or limit learning and resilience during disaster recovery. Important to this discussion are concepts related to the autonomy that local governments enjoy over their fiscal and decision-making affairs, intergovernmental relationships with state and federal agencies that can influence disaster recovery, and the dynamics of groups that form in the aftermath of a disaster. The chapter presents data to show that more collaborative intergovernmental relationships between state and local governments lead to higher levels of in-depth learning after disasters.

Chapter 7 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience discusses the importance of relationships that can encourage or limit learning and resilience during disaster recovery. Perhaps most importantly, the nature of local government collaboration with various individuals and groups during the recovery process proved to be vital to recovery planning and decision-making. There are a variety of ways that residents and other stakeholders can engage with their local governments during disaster recovery and some of these more engaged groups can encourage policy learning and changes made by their local governments.

As discussed in Chapter 5, risk perceptions may be influenced by personal experiences, deeply held beliefs, and political ideology. But individual risk perceptions may also be affected by engagement in social processes, such as information seeking and participation in disaster-related discussions. Information sought and consumed after a disaster and trust in these sources of information may influence how individuals think about a disaster, its causes, and support (or not) of policy solutions (see Figure III.1). Furthermore, experiencing a disaster may erode trust in officials that are charged with managing disaster-related risks. Levels of trust in government officials may in turn influence information seeking and support for policy action. This chapter investigates the relationships among individual experiences, information seeking, participation in flood recovery processes, and attitudes toward risk mitigation actions.

Disasters at the local level can serve as focusing events that increase agenda attention related to disaster response, recovery, and preparedness issues. Increased agenda attention can lead to policy changes and also to learning. The degree and type of learning that occurs after a disaster within a government organization can matter to policy outcomes related to individual, household, and community-level risks and resilience. Local governments oversee disaster planning and recovery and are the first line of disaster response. They also bear the burden of performing long-term disaster recovery and planning for future events. And yet, scholars do not have a clearly articulated framework for understanding if, how, and with what effect local governments learn after a disaster strikes their community. Drawing from analyses conducted over a five-year period of multiple disaster-affected communities in Colorado, USA, a framework of learning after disaster within local governments is presented.

In Chapter 4 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience, the role that variation in resources plays in disaster recovery are analyzed. Resources are categorized as existing capacity the local government had prior to the flood and in-flow of external resources during and after emergency response. This chapter explores the resources that Colorado communities had available to them before the flood and how the disaster affected their resources afterwards. Specifically, the pre-existing capacity of communities to withstand such events is explored. In the wake of a disaster, a community’s resources, including financial, technical, administrative, and civic capacity, may propel a community towards more resilient recovery or, alternatively, may constrain the actions taken to rebuild and recover from a disaster. This chapter integrates and clarifies how resources and resource mobilization may influence post-disaster policy change and learning at the local level.

This opening chapter to Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience introduces readers to the increasing importance of disasters in the context of climate change. The chapter draws upon examples of various disasters to illustrate the topical importance and to motivate the specific analyses to follow. The discussion articulates the necessity of governments at all scales to cope with preparing for extreme events and provides an overview of what governments go through after a disaster. In particular, whether governments learn lessons in the aftermath of disaster can determine how they choose to rebuild. These decisions can lead to greater resilience for communities, but prior studies have rarely found this observed outcome. This chapter ends by motivating the question that structures the rest of the book – what factors lead a community to learn, make changes, and move towards a more resilient state after it is struck by a disaster?