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.