Building Social Cohesion for Disaster Recovery
Guided by the central question, “What factors contribute to more resilient communities and stronger disaster recovery?”, this component of my research explores the social factors that enable communities to respond to and recover from environmental disasters. Even the most well-planned and well-designed interventions fall short if they do not account for community dynamics, trust in institutions, and local forms of knowledge. One key contribution of my work was to reconfigure the role of social cohesion in disaster recovery, developing a framework that quantitatively assessed its correlation with recovery outcomes and qualitatively examined how cohesion can be reinforced to enhance resilience. This research identified the internal and external factors that shape recovery and provided actionable strategies for policymakers to foster equitable and resilient recovery pathways, resulting in four peer-reviewed publications, including articles in the Journal of Planning Literature. Currently, I am extending this work to evaluate municipal plans in Puerto Rico to identify strengths and gaps in policy approaches to long-term resilience
Disaster Recovery
Hazards such as hurricanes, flooding, drought, and fires are becoming the norm for many communities in the 21st century. Numerous articles in the mainstream and academic press focus on how environmental disruptions have impacted communities and how these communities have worked to combat these shocks. With the uptick in climatic hazards, communities are trying to understand better how they can overcome and recover.
Over the last couple of decades, the resiliency notion of three "A's" (anticipate, absorb, and adapt) has led the charge in this context. While resiliency has proven to be worthwhile in many aspects, it tends to leave out the process of post-disaster recovery. Yet, this process links how we get from absorb to adapt. Knowledge of the post-disaster recovery process is imperative for understanding how to anticipate and prepare for future shocks. This understanding allows communities to better plan for and anticipate how quickly they can get back to pre-disaster equilibrium. Without a strong foundation in the workings of the post-disaster recovery process, communities cannot plan for the future and adapt to future environmental shocks.
Emphasis on pre-disaster status
As the literature has shown, the extent and speed of recovery are as dependent on the community's status before the event as it is on the actual recovery process (infrastructure, emergency management, etc.). This basis is not necessarily a case of income or a well-functioning government but rather is a combination of multiple factors. Thus, recovery must look to create a balanced society across social, economic, environmental, and governance aspects. Communities might suffer from different types and levels of vulnerabilities pre-disaster that make the effects of the same disaster harsher for them compared to less vulnerable communities. Some communities or households are more socially vulnerable – e.g., class structure, gender issues -, some are more politically vulnerable – e.g., the form of government -, and some are more economically vulnerable – e.g., income level, government debt – that each affects different households differently.
The emotional recovery: issues of psychological and sociological stability
Since the 1970s, there has been a greater emphasis on the psychological well-being of communities post-disaster. This concept should be more integrated into hazards analyses since, without it, true recovery cannot happen. As disasters almost always lead to psychological distress among survivors and this emotional distress is more the result of the hardship of the recovery process and rebuilding than merely the impacts of the event, the disaster recovery process must consider addressing anxiety and stress, mood difficulties, somatic complaints, and behavioral changes among survivors.
Pre- and post-disaster equity
A just society meets everyone's basic needs. Recovery will not succeed unless both wealthy and disadvantaged neighborhoods get equal financial and resource aid. A significant intensifier of disaster risk is the unfair distribution of resources pre-and post-disaster that leads to disproportional impacts of the same disaster on people and different societies. As a result, communities do not achieve disaster recovery equally, nor does recovery follow a clear and specific process across all cities.
Resiliency
The first and last stage of the revamped model is the resiliency stage. This stage, in theory, would come before and continue through and after the commemorative stage, which is the fourth stage of the previous model. This stage considers previous disaster impacts and measures used to combat them. It should emphasize how well the community readjusts and reconfigures their society for each base (social, economic, environmental, and governance). We see the pre-development resiliency phase as the most important in the new reconfigured model. It lays the foundation for how well a community will rebound from a similar shock to the system.
In this sense, understanding how resilient a community is, enables decision-makers to predict how quickly the community will recover. With this understanding, they can estimate how long each recovery phase may take. It will help decision-makers distribute resources appropriately as well (Sobhaninia and Buckman, 2022).
Social Cohesion
Given the high probability of future environmental disasters, it is crucial to identify the main contributing factors that make communities more resilient pre-disaster and in turn a faster and stronger recovery post-disaster. Therefore, the present study continued the study by the authors and adopted two steps to identify the primary factors leading to higher recovery post-disaster and ways to reinforce resilience to environmental hazards in the case studies.
Findings showed that social cohesion has little long-term impact and does not affect the recovery rate steadily in all phases. Based on the results, having stronger social cohesion in the community can help facilitate and speed up the emergency recovery phase. However, even though stronger social cohesion can benefit communities in other phases, its effectiveness is limited. Thus, other phases are more dependent on available external resources and fund allocation, and the absence of them can slower and, in some cases, halt recovery.
Based on the results, to maintain the social cohesion impact on disaster recovery, internal factors, such as community engagement, social network, human capital, and community leadership, should improve within communities pre-disaster. In addition, external factors empower communities and increase their resilience to future shocks. Based on the findings, the most crucial external factors are citizen engagement in disaster preparation and mitigation planning, sustainable new developments, available resources—economic resources (fund allocation and distribution of the fund), natural resources, resilient infrastructure, resilient public places, and medical resources—, and community education.
Moreover, the finding suggested that the fund distribution process needs a fundamental modification to make local organizations with bottom-up community actions more effective in fund distribution. A new funding mechanism arose after Maria, which decentralized the funding distribution mechanism and made community leaders more responsible for identifying vulnerable communities and distributing the available funding.
Illustrative Publications
Sobhaninia S, Amirzadeh M, Rastar E, Tayebi S, Rivera F, Bonaiuto M (2025). The Power of Place: How Place Satisfaction Impacts Disaster Recovery in Communities Facing Environmental Disruptions. Journal of Natural Hazards Review