Organizational Challenges of Post-Fire Recovery: Decision Making, Collective Action, and Community Outcomes

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Disasters are increasing, destroying homes and infrastructure within communities in the United States. After these events, governmental organizations must make decisions on how to rebuild, including the adoption and enforcement of building codes and processes. These decisions will have a long-term influence on community outcomes such as resiliency (reducing risks of future disasters) and sustainability (reducing climate change impacts). Simultaneously, these organizations face short-term pressures to rebuild expediently and cost-effectively to accommodate displaced residents. In parallel, homeowners must decide if and how they will rebuild, including whether and how they will convene with other affected homeowners to rebuild. This project is studying information-seeking, decision-making, and actions for rebuilding by jurisdictions and homeowners. By assessing long-term community outcomes and analyzing how these decisions and processes influence these outcomes, findings will help inform the development and adoption of building codes and processes to achieve desired community outcomes and provide guidance on how homeowners can meet collective goals after a disaster. By conducting and analyzing interviews, meetings, and correspondence, the project team is characterizing how jurisdictional organizations seek information, identify and address tradeoffs, and make post-fire rebuilding decisions; and characterizing how emergent groups of homeowners organize, seek information, determine collective goals, and rebuild. Employing fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to study collective groups of homeowners, the project team will then analyze how combinations of process, structure, and decisions enabled or inhibited progress on collective goals and outcomes. Finally, the project team will develop novel engineering assessments in terms of housing’s resiliency (e.g., future fire risk), sustainability (e.g., energy use and embodied carbon), and expediency (e.g., rebuilding time) to perform a cross-case comparison that links organizational decisions and processes to these outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.