Outmatched by Disaster? Recovery-Based Learning and Training Competencies for Planners

Recovery Funding

Applying for and managing funding is critical to recovery processes (Macaskill and Guthrie 2018; Olshansky and Johnson 2017). All interviewees lamented difficulties in finding, using, and aligning funding to recovery needs. Recovery funding is a known challenge described in the literature (Fraser et al. 2022), and these respondents outlined why understanding and accessing government funding is challenging. First, recovery funding programs exist across multiple governmental agencies, making it difficult to find and apply to multiple sources with different criteria. Second, reading large amounts of funding information for the first time frustrates those in the time-compressed post-disaster environment, as a planner shared, “. . . it’s hard for people to go through all this information and find out what’s useful . . . .” Third, funding opportunities lack clear guidelines or change regularly, as another interviewee noted,

Even when we have these plans and policies in place that line up nicely with the federal government or the state [such as in a pre-disaster recovery plan], a year, two years down the line, they may not be relevant anymore because the policies have changed.

Fourth, many funding objectives do not match community needs. One interviewee from a historic coastal town shared that during the post-disaster recovery, “We couldn’t convince FEMA to spend the money on stabilization versus demolition. We worked for a long time to show that that could be an acceptable option for the money.” This uncertainty exists even when pre-disaster recovery plans are in place, as a recovery consultant noted in one of their experiences, “They really referred to it [the pre-disaster recovery plan] but they recognized that it had to be flexible and that priorities couldn’t always be met because many of [the actions] were driven by external rather than internal resources.” Finally, obtained funding is slow to arrive. Several federal programs take extensive pre-planning for the application and may take months or years for approval, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR). A city employee lamented, “It took HUD three years to issue us the money for the buyout program!” Instead, the municipality fronted its own money while waiting for federal funds, an option not available to all communities.

Streamlining the bureaucracy of government funding and revising recovery programs to meet each individual community’s needs is a laudable goal. But aligning projects to funding opportunities is a core task for practicing planners. Recovery education and training could raise awareness of funding challenges for recovery and encourage pre-disaster recovery planning or review of funding programs. As one interview noted, basic awareness of funding options could improve pre- and post-disaster planning,

Disaster recovery is funded with two or three large programs or buckets of money. If planners become more familiar with the programs and the flexibilities of the programs and how they work together, how they don’t work together and what they can do, I think that would help because there’s a disconnect between a plan and its implementation resources.

Formal education that provides basic awareness of which agencies provide recovery funding and how could jumpstart planners’ post-disaster search for funding and improve alignment of pre-disaster plans with implementation, as the interviewee noted. Planners could then refresh themselves on details of specific funding programs during the post-disaster recovery process.

Volunteer Coordination Post-Disaster

An influx of volunteers with varying skills and resources can offset some funding and timing constraints (Whittaker, McLennan, and Handmer 2015), but only if well-organized (Phillips and Mincin 2023). Ad-hoc spontaneous volunteers are a well-known coordination problem for emergency management (Drabek and McEntire 2003; Helsloot and Ruitenberg 2004), but this topic is less emphasized in the disaster planning literature. Volunteers in disaster recovery range from spontaneous citizens arriving to support relief, professional teams deployed to support jurisdictions, as well as citizens who become community recovery champions (Phillips 2013).

While volunteers are common in emergency management, planning interviewees lacked clear plans for volunteer management. Coordinating volunteers to match skillsets to needed recovery processes challenged local professionals who felt that volunteers distracted them from other recovery priorities. One historic preservation professional lamented this issue in their experience post-disaster:

One of the huge issues was how to manage those volunteers . . . get them where they need to go and to make sure they are providing the right type of assistance. . . . There were many volunteer groups that came in and were not adequately trained on dealing with historic buildings. . . . Having volunteers can be a good thing and can be a difficult thing if we don’t know how to manage them.

Professionals, without awareness of volunteer engagement in disaster recovery, often failed to recognize these volunteers as assets. For example, one planner did not see volunteers as something useful for the post-disaster recovery process, although volunteers were clearly addressing unmet needs in their community:

We didn’t get any real community groups engaging in the [post-disaster recovery]. But most of the people who are organizing are the members of the public, community groups and environmental groups, [who] were responding to the public’s need for housing, or food, or opening their own homes or putting together a response.

One recovery leader who started as a volunteer emphasized that volunteer coordination for recovery is not discussed well in planning education:

What I don’t really see so often in planning books is that communities should never underestimate the role that citizens and volunteers can play in long-term recovery. I’m not the only person that’s done this work as a volunteer. . . . There are all kinds of people that are going to be willing to step up.

Interviewees even noted that professional planning volunteers were a burden. While expert advice is beneficial before too many recovery decisions are solidified, interviewees felt that well-intended RPATs didn’t match the needs at that time. One professional described their experience:

After the storm you really need teams that can do surveying, assess damage before you can even start developing plans. . . . There were a lot of planning assistance teams that came in to do planning-related work as far as zoning and ordinances, but I definitely think that is needed later in the process and not in the beginning . . . .

Interviewees confirmed previous literature that the post-disaster period can create “planning fatigue” (Nelson, Ehrenfeucht, and Laska 2007). “We called it ‘planning fatigue.’ We had so many [professional] volunteer groups coming in and trying to help with [post-disaster] planning efforts and all these meetings and eventually the residents just got tired,” one respondent recalled.

Overall, planners and allied professionals describe a need for improved competency around coordinating both professional and spontaneous volunteers, whose influx is a unique component of disaster recovery compared to everyday planning.

The Need for Equity in Recovery

The AICP Code of Ethics emphasizes equity and inclusion (APA 2021), and this is an important issue in disaster recovery. Interviewees witnessed varying levels of success in integrating equity into pre- or post-disaster recovery planning and described their own and professionals’ lack of awareness of how equity could be integrated.

Most interviewees lacked examples of equity in recovery planning. One city planner stated, “To be blunt, we don’t talk about social justice much in pre-disaster [recovery planning].” Attempts at equity incorporation into pre-disaster planning failed due to difficulty translating equity goals into outcomes:

I’ve seen some recovery planning processes, primarily pre-disaster processes, trying to navigate how to build some sort of equity framework, how to prioritize assistance to certain parts of a community where there’s been disinvestment in the past, but I don’t know that I’ve seen anything yet that is entirely successful.

Turning words into actions was the challenge, even when professionals were aware of vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. One expert provided an example from a community completing a post-disaster plan:

If you look at the recovery plan of what projects were prioritized, they really prioritized the needs of vulnerable populations, especially low-income, elderly, single-parent, and tried to think about equity as an important driver of recovery decision-making. But past that, the actual process of getting [those priorities] done required other political processes.

Across our interviews, speedy housing and infrastructure replacement overshadowed equity concerns, as exemplified by one professional’s quote, “It [equity] wasn’t an issue that really came up. In the thick of things [post-disaster], we just wanted to provide housing in the quickest manner possible.” Another planner noted that equity efforts are siloed from other aspects of planning, “Vulnerable populations are something that probably doesn’t get enough attention in terms of recovery, because usually that’s already something special we need to do.”

Successful equity incorporation involved continuous efforts throughout the overall planning process, not just during disasters. Communities that had pre-existing procedural equity efforts also attempted equity during recovery visioning. A local planner described their use of pre-existing equity programming for recovery outreach:

We have developed a department that came out of a perceived need to reach out to the lower-income, ethnic neighborhoods. . . . This group also took over neighborhood watch meetings and brought us in at neighborhood watch meetings to help when we’ve got a special project that’s going on or if somebody has proposed a development in the neighborhood. We’ll come in ahead of time and talk to them about any of their concerns.

Another planner described their own community’s approach:

We have city council appointed advocates to our Board to help keep [neighborhood inequality] in the forefront and have created a department to help make sure that we don’t miss outreach opportunities or opportunities for them to speak to us through public meetings.

Another planner relayed an example in which equity facilitated the inclusion and participation of lower-income communities in various planning efforts because of engagement efforts prior to the disaster:

We do take care of lower-income neighborhoods and there are some predominant minority neighborhoods near the downtown area that have been getting a lot of specialized attention for 20 years. They’re getting attention because they had public input during the visioning process in ’97 [disaster] that brought it to the forefront, then really pushed it forward in the 2000 comprehensive plan which was replicated by outreach and workshops in the 2010 comprehensive plan.

In summary, equity was not central in either pre- or post-disaster recovery in most professionals’ experience, though a few exceptions existed when equity was already something the community prioritized. As a core planning topic, the lack of consideration of equity shows a continued need in general planning education, not just recovery training. Providing educational opportunities that support planners to address equity in everyday planning activities may help counteract the recovery challenge of time compression, which often resulted in communities prioritizing speed of recovery actions over inclusive engagement. Engagement in general, though, was a challenge faced by planners undertaking recovery.

Public Participation in Recovery Planning

Interviewees indicated that participation in general was not central to recovery planning. As mentioned above, “planning fatigue” is one challenge to robust participation in post-disaster recovery planning. But another challenge discussed by interviewees was that public participation during post-disaster recovery – led mostly by emergency management – focused on just informing rather than broader engagement (Arnstein 1969). The public was aware of this, as a recovery consultant explained:

I think there’s a very real question of return on investment for community members who participate because very often, they’re getting presented a set of options that have already been predetermined, so they’re being asked to rank options somebody else came up with, and there’s no real guarantee that much will come out of what people say or ask for.

Interviewees indicated that planning professionals were not as involved in public engagement as one would expect from the disaster or planning literature, as noted by a planning department supervisor:

We don’t do the recovery process, per se, but I know that the emergency management folks have a manager who works on public participation, so I know that they do conduct public participation. As a planning agency, we’re not necessarily involved in that aspect of the recovery process.

Planners, unlike emergency managers, though, are trained to conduct public participation and are also aware of what meaningful participation looks like. Post-disaster participation often did not extend beyond mandatory requirements and took the form of public meetings. Planners, as described by the interviewees, did not leverage their training in public engagement, despite its recognized importance in the planning profession. A community capacity officer reiterated what post-disaster participation often entails in recovery:

We simply try to get everyone in the community aware of the process and to get them to engage with us. So whether by sending out flyers, talking about the process in churches, getting the city council or county commissioners to put up notice out there and encourage people to come and participate.

Communities are being encouraged to participate in a process that has mostly already happened without their input. Public participation standards in accessing disaster recovery funds rarely galvanized enough support from communities, especially when public engagement was limited pre-disaster. An applied recovery expert detailed:

Certainly the formal planning processes, when there were more formal processes, had a set of deliverables or milestones in terms of timelines for bringing people together for doing some type of discovery, for doing community outreach, for creating goals and projects. . . . I would say, though, that simply achieving a certain level of interest, buy-in, and participation is to me maybe one of the most important milestones, and I have rarely seen that really happen.

The interviewees’ discussion implies two concerns for planning. First, planning professionals seem to be disengaged from public engagement in recovery, which is something that is a core competency for the field. Second, even if they are involved, disaster recovery public engagement is unique and more difficult, as residents are either not interested pre-disaster or fatigued, preoccupied with personal recovery, or displaced post-disaster.

Expanded Professional Collaboration for Recovery

Recovery, all interviewees agreed, requires broad government and non-governmental engagement. But that does not regularly happen in their experience, and interviewees blamed both planners and emergency managers for this disconnect. They felt emergency managers had limited relationships for broad collaboration, but that planners did not understand recovery well enough to engage.

An applied recovery specialist described the lack of relationships that emergency management had with other entities as “one of the biggest challenges” for recovery, “Repeatedly, I’ve just seen a lack of folks at the table, often because they weren’t invited, other times because they didn’t see the value.” An emergency manager agreed that they wanted better coordination and that their profession was not best suited to lead recovery: “Some of the best practices that we’ve seen from other places is that the emergency manager might not be the best person to lead the community recovery.” Another emergency manager felt that planners should be central to recovery, but planners were not stepping forward:

The actual planners, themselves, don’t see recovery as a responsibility of theirs, even though when we look at the types of activity that would take place as part of recovery planning a lot of it is very similar to the type of work they do day-to-day.

Some interviewees suggested that time compression was the barrier to planner engagement because planners could not or would not adapt their regular planning processes. A floodplain manager described their role as “more practical” to the recovery environment compared to planners’ traditional processes:

What I mean by practical is doing kind of short-cut planning processes, meeting communities where they are at in acknowledging that they want to get back to normal as quickly as possible. In my experience, I have seen a lot of the planning response being a little too focused on breadth and consideration versus speed.

Another allied professional supported this view that planners didn’t grasp the urgency of the recovery process, making collaboration difficult. The time-compressed nature of recovery highlights competing priorities and differing competencies of these two professions. Emergency management, historically top-down, is designed for speed, while planning focuses on deliberation and consensus building – making time compression challenging not just to recovery processes but even to coordination between professionals. A principal planner felt that planners needed to learn from other fields: “In trying to learn about the recovery process, I’m hoping that we don’t just talk to planners, that we are talking to engineers, emergency operation folks, things outside of our usual realm of professional contacts.”

An opportunity for planners and emergency management to coordinate better is via plan integration. Literature and results from our interviews showed that planners and emergency managers have limited engagement in pre-disaster recovery planning. It is especially untenable to advance this collaboration for the first time during post-disaster recovery processes. Interviewees had different reasons why plan integration was not occurring. One experienced practitioner felt that the influx of money encouraged states to start fresh rather than draw upon existing plans:

In some communities, no plans are used [after a major disaster]. Once there was that much money, the governor created a new entity, and the state mitigation plan went out the window. Comprehensive plans I’ve seen get updated completely separate from everything that was going on with disaster recovery and with mitigation.

Another respondent expressed that the existing comprehensive and hazard mitigation plans were not relevant to post-disaster recovery because they were “rebuilding in place” and is evidence of the disconnect between disaster recovery and building long-term community resilience:

I will say that the comprehensive plan doesn’t come into play too often in my experience because most of what you’re doing following a disaster is you’re rebuilding in place, which means that you’re not really replanning an area. So you’re not looking at it from the comprehensive planning standpoint.

Ignoring comprehensive planning processes and goals for land use and disaster mitigation might result in another disaster event.

Respondents felt the lack of collaboration was acute in communities not recently affected by disaster. The interviews captured the need for wider collaboration between planners, other professionals, agencies, and communities working in disaster recovery, both pre- and post-disaster, while noting that planners may lack awareness of emergency management processes and willingness to engage in collaboration.

Introducing Time Compression into Planning Education

All the challenges faced above relate to time compression in disaster recovery. Time compression is a unique aspect of recovery planning, affecting planners’ capacity to implement their skills from public participation and equity to building collaborations and using funding (Olshansky, Hopkins, and Johnson 2012). Many interviewees noted the issue of speed versus deliberation, and specifically how planners are not trained for speed, as exemplified by one interviewee’s suggestion,

I think that we need to rewire our entire system, we’re not wired the same way as the folks that are dealing with disaster response programs. First responders, they are in and out, they work with a sense of urgency. As planners, we don’t. And we need to have a collective sense of urgency and speed because that’s the pace at which recovery is actually occurring.

Another interviewee expressed the need for planners to understand ahead of time just how fast recovery happens, “Make sure that folks understand how fast this stuff moves. How fast communities want to move, and property wants to move, and begin to make that part of the framework for recovering.”

Classroom interventions can expose students to this context through case-based learning with real-world dilemmas and decision-making under pressure (Abbott 2005; Balassiano 2011).

University programs could simulate the time-compressed, competitive nature of disaster recovery, allowing students to confront conflict and uncertainty (Balassiano 2011; Balassiano and West 2012). Embedded studios in communities recovering from disaster also offer experiential learning that mirrors time-compressed environments and showcases the challenge of disaster recovery public participation (Sletto 2013; Wilson 2024). Opportunities to reflect on these exercises are critical to developing new knowledge systems for disaster recovery (Ross, Haque, and Berkes 2024). Programs with service-learning partnerships could return to their previous communities when disasters occur to support plan integration with recovery operations (Botchwey and Umemoto 2020). Other options include charrettes requiring intense work over a short period or with limited information. Programs could simulate shortcut or quick planning processes in charrettes as desired by an interviewee, “how to do some quick planning and quick successes. Not necessarily just the full-on, most comprehensive way to do recovery planning, but how to do quick-wins, quick-successes.”

Once on-the-job, educational needs post-disaster revolve around finding and distilling large amounts of information in ways appropriate for their community quickly. Expansion of professional support networks would provide greater access to peers, which are so crucial to planners’ learning and emotional well-being. Databases of short case studies, example tools and actions, and up-to-date funding information will also support planners during time compression.

Learning with Emergency Management

Our results and previous research on the lack of integration related to hazards emphasize that planners need more awareness of disaster management including the basics of emergency operations and risk assessment. Cross-training with emergency management can foster mutual understanding and collaborative capacity (Botchwey and Umemoto 2020; Kapucu and Knox 2013). Additions to formal planning programs include electives on disaster management, guest speakers with disaster experience, and case studies of recovery across various courses. These additions of emergency management expertise will expose students to volunteer management and financing challenges. Other pedagogical options include joint tabletop exercises or semi-functional exercises, common in emergency management (Kapucu and Knox 2013), where scenarios are targeted toward challenges such as donations management, volunteer integration, or funding. These activities help each profession understand the other’s decision-making and simulate time compression.

Service-learning opportunities in disaster management are also beneficial. Students could review hazard mitigation plans during other projects and meet with emergency management to understand their processes. Applied planning studios could tackle hazard mitigation plans or pre-disaster recovery plans. Cross-listed studios, charettes, or design challenges could bring together planning and emergency management students. Internships with emergency management could provide valuable experience in recovery planning and funding.

Educational opportunities for practicing planners should encourage their engagement in emergency planning activities and networking with those professionals. Convincing practicing planners that disaster planning is valuable may be achieved through “cross-listing” of continuing educational credits for disaster-related conferences, offering short courses from APA taught with emergency management, and encouraging hazard-focused plan integration.

Incorporating Disaster Resilience into Comprehensive Planning

Research shows that community processes emphasized pre-disaster will continue post-disaster (Schwab 2014; Smith 2014), and those not emphasized will also not continue, as our interviewees confirmed. Lack of equity considerations in recovery as well as the disconnect between long-range planning and recovery planning discussed by the interviewees highlight how this continuity undermines the ideal of re-envisioning community development post-disaster (Jerolleman 2019). Interviewees wanted recovery considered in planners’ everyday roles, “I think connecting recovery to their day job and how doing some work up front will really help recovery. . . . It’s really hard for people to think about how to re-envision their community post-disaster.” Learning about plan integration as students and then implementing it as practicing planners could address several of the recovery competencies including promoting collaboration, incorporating equity, and supporting public participation.

Core planning curricula improvements emphasizing well-designed comprehensive plans, plan integration, equity, and participation will support planners everyday and during recovery. Interviewees emphasized the need to encourage good planning practices in the face of a desire for speed,

I spend a lot of time in community meetings after floods talking to them about not doing something stupid like repealing their codes. Because in their minds it helps facilitate a faster rebuilding process, an easier process. [I would] actually do the opposite, which was encouraging more stringent standards so that the recovery was more resilient.

Considering disaster recovery and equity together with comprehensive and long-range planning acknowledges that disasters will affect the goals and strategies of an existing comprehensive plan, while a well-developed comprehensive plan provides the groundwork for successful recovery planning. Education on opportunities for improved equity in day-to-day planning practices would also support recovery planning. Curricula focused on public participation in core planning education can add nuances for disaster planning, encouraging future planners to guide this aspect of recovery. Increased attention to these competencies in core planning classes and in continuing education opportunities will support planners overall and during recovery.