Recovery coordination is the process of safely managing the aftermath of a disaster, the rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating of the community. Recovery coordination involves managing which policies and investments are being used, who they affect, who is responsible for them, what their impacts will be, and how they might interrelate. Sometimes an emergency is small enough not to need one, but if there are lots of groups involved and people or systems affected, a recovery coordination effort will be essential.

Recovery coordination efforts ensure that everyone involved in the recovery knows what is happening, and what their responsibilities are. This prevents duplicated work, lets people act quickly and aids communication. It’s also useful to help document how the recovery process has been organized, for the sake of transparency, so it can be reviewed in future and learnt from, and to aid monitoring efforts. Successful recovery coordination systems can help inform future resilience strategies, emergency plans and recovery policies. 

Recovery coordination plans and teams will function best where they are flexible. This means being agile and responsive to a changing situation and new feedback. They should be managed inclusively and collaboratively, involving representatives from any organizations or industries involved in the recovery effort, and community members who will be affected by the recovery policies. Members of vulnerable and disadvantaged or minoritized groups should be involved as a priority. 

Recovery coordination may be threatened when affected groups aren’t consulted or ignore their advice. If an emergency happens again, or a new crisis arises, recovery coordination may need to evolve and change. Lack of community involvement in coordination plans may mean that recovery efforts are unsuccessful as they don’t work or have unintended consequences.

Whenever you take an action on a Local Project in your play area that adds 2 or more Social Resilience tokens to your player board, you may remove 1 Community in Crisis from your player board.

• Recovery Coordination Framework (London Resilience Partnership)

• 📄 Exploring interdepencies and common goals in disaster recovery coordination by Emmanuel Raju, Per Becker, Henrik Tehler

• The Green Recovery Database (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD)

• Join local recovery coordination efforts - like citizens forums or networks contributing to emergency recovery plans.

• Advocate for your community group, organization or workplace to join recovery coordination efforts and contribute your ideas or services.

• Question whether recovery coordination efforts are democratic, inclusive and accessible to make sure that all communities are represented in them.