Building Resilience during Recovery: Lessons from Colorado's Watershed Resilience Pilot Program

As the potential for and scope of some types of disasters increases, so too does the need to build greater disaster resilience across the globe. Communities ideally begin building resilience prior to experiencing a disaster in order to reduce negative impacts and ease recovery processes; however, numerous environmental and sociopolitical factors can impede such efforts until a disaster occurs. While the disaster recovery period offers opportunities for communities to build resilience as they replace infrastructure and restore services, a host of new issues arise during this time that can further complicate or delay resilience building. In this study, we highlight the opportunities and challenges inherent at the intersection of disaster recovery and resilience building, which we term the "recovery-resilience nexus." To study this nexus, we analyze a first-of-its-kind disaster recovery program in Colorado, United States, that promotes resilience-building activities in disaster-affected communities by supporting the efforts of place-based watershed coalitions. Although the program faced numerous and interrelated technical, political, and fiscal hurdles, we argue that it provides an opportunity for drawing important lessons about how communities can navigate the recovery-resilience nexus via cross-boundary collaboration and creatively leveraging traditional disaster recovery funding sources to achieve resilience goals.