Puerto Rico’s Post-Maria Recovery Plan: the Whole Community is Missing

Background

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, damaging infrastructure damage, killing 2,975 people, and causing and an estimated $90+ billion in losses. In response, the Government of Puerto Rico and FEMA produced Transformation and Innovation in the Wake of Devastation (PDF), a long-term recovery plan outlining 278 courses of action across sectors including energy, water, housing, health, education, and transportation.

This network visualizes the funders and implementers named across those 278 courses of action. Each node is an organization; each connection represents a funder and implementer named together in the same course of action within the plan’s text. The result is 222 distinct actors and roughly 1,200 connections.

A Plan Centered on the Government of Puerto Rico and Federal Agencies

A few patterns stand out from this analysis:

• The Government of Puerto Rico is the single most connected actor (97 connections), reflecting its role as the central coordinating body across nearly every sector.

• The HUD block grant program, CDBG-DR, is the most-connected funding source (105 connections), underscoring how dependent the plan is on a federal mechanism.

• Puerto Rico’s own government agencies form the largest bloc of implementers (81 of 222 actors), followed by federal agencies (62), suggesting implementation runs primarily through territorial institutions rather than federal ones directly.

• “Nongovernment sources” appears as a large, diffuse funding node (96 edges) an indication share of the plan’s funding was not pinned to a specific funder.

The analysis indicates that the government of Puerto Rico and federal agencies are central to the recovery plan.

Whole-Community Perspectives Are Missing

FEMA’s “whole community” framework (PDF) articulates that individuals and families, the private sector, nonprofit and faith-based groups, community organizations, and government all work together to address disaster.

From this whole community perspective several gaps stand out:

• Municipal government is nearly invisible. Only 3 of 222 nodes are municipal-level, despite Puerto Rico having 78 municipalities that did much of the actual ground-level response and recovery work. The plan defaults to “municipal governments” as a single generic bucket rather than naming specific municipalities, meaning that the network cannot show whether recovery capacity was concentrated in San Juan or distributed across the island.

• Community and individual actors are thin. Only 20 of 222 nodes (9%) fall under Community/Individual — categories like “communities,” “homeowners,” and “health care providers.” Greater detail on the actual community actor implementers rather than fold them into generic categories is necessary for truly engaging from a whole community perspective.

• Private sector actors are lacking. Private sector actors comprised 20 of 222 nodes (same size as Community/Individual actors) and are concentrated in insurance/construction/lending roles rather than local business.

• Faith-based organizations are absent, despite how central churches and religious networks were to post-Maria response: distributing supplies, running shelters, and coordinating volunteers, often before formal aid arrived.

• Informal and mutual-aid infrastructure is absent. The mutual aid organizations that emerged after Maria to fill critical service gaps and advocate for change are not included.

• No diaspora. Stateside Puerto Rican communities provided significant remittances, supplies, and labor after Maria, but diaspora organizations do not appear as a category.

Why Exclusion of the Whole Community Matters

Decades of research and practice show that households and communities are central to all aspects of disaster management, following disaster (Wisner et al., 2004; Twigg et al., 2017; Clark-Ginsberg, 2020; Clark-Ginsberg, 2021 — for quick overviews, see Realizing the Power of Community in Disaster Recovery and What's Missing from Community Disaster Response? The Whole Community). Households and communities do the lion's share of rebuilding. They are the ones with the knowledge and understanding of their own needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities. Excluding the whole community can delay recovery, waste money, and create risk.

Households and civil society drove much of the actual work on the ground after Maria, both in Puerto Rico (Zeno Gonzalez & Butler, 2025; Petrun Sayers et al., 2022; Roque et al., 2020) and for Puerto Ricans displaced to the mainland (Clark-Ginsberg et al., 2023). Municipalities that engaged their communities recovered faster than those that did not (Rivera et al., 2021). Puerto Ricans trusted NGOs and community actors more than they trusted the government (Towe et al., 2020).

So why was the whole community left out of the Maria recovery plan? Two (non-mutually exclusive) explanations seem plausible.

The first is the level at which the plan was built: national. A high-level national plan may lack granularity to operate at the community level. But if so, the plan should include operational guidance for downscaling: concrete direction on how state and municipal actors could adapt it to include lower-level perspectives and needs. It did not.

The second explanation is that the plan simply did not include community voices. Puerto Rico's recovery has been critiqued for this lack of community engagement (see Marxuach 2022) and there do not appear to be clear, formal, structures for incorporating community voices into recovery decision-making and planning.

Including the Whole Community in Disaster Recovery Plans is Possible

Including the whole community in recovery plans is possible, but it takes effort and time. During recovery decisions are made on compressed timelines and recovery planners must balance competing pressures of speed, thoroughness, and completeness, so it is easy to default to top-down approaches .

A few strategies can help:

• Build community recovery infrastructure in the form of committees within affected municipalities made up of key community representatives that can be used to align and coordinate recovery processes.

• Tie plans and funding to those committees so community input carries weight.

• Set recovery aims and objectives through community guidance rather than predetermined targets. Communities may want to rebuild exactly as before, or they may prefer different forms of rebuilding or different sequences.

• Use community-derived metrics to track recovery progress. Metrics matter for monitoring recovery, but progress for communities isn’t really about inputs like recovery spends or outputs like rebuilding physical infrastructure. It’s about outcomes of what that infrastructure enables: a return to normalcy, jobs, housing, healthcare, and community.

In other countries (Kenya and Bangladesh, for example) community disaster management committees are embedded as a standing part of the broader disaster management infrastructure. The closest equivalents in the U.S. are the VOAD structures, which convene community representatives but carry no formal governance authority, and FEMA's CERT program, which trains volunteers but likewise has no governance role. This is a structural gap in federal guidance inhibits community driven disaster management and whole community recovery. Fortunately, federal guidance is just that — guidance. State and local emergency managers have the power to create their own governance structures that are responsive to communities.

Further Reading

On this plan and its critique

Center for a New Economy, "Puerto Rico Recovery Task Force" (2022). https://grupocne.org/2022/09/28/puerto-rico-recovery-task-force/

Towe, V.L., Petrun Sayers, E.L., Chan, E.W., Kim, A.Y., Tom, A., Chan, W.Y., Marquis, J.P., Robbins, M.W., Saum-Manning, L., & Weden, M.M. (2020). Community Planning and Capacity Building in Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria: Predisaster Conditions, Hurricane Damage, and Courses of Action. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2598.html

On community and civil-society response in Puerto Rico

Clark-Ginsberg, A., Sprague Martinez, L., Scaramutti, C., Rodríguez, J., Salas-Wright, C.P., & Schwartz, S.J. (2023). "Social vulnerability shapes the experiences of climate migrants displaced by Hurricane Maria." Climate and Development, 16(1), 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2023.2176188

Delilah Roque, A., Pijawka, D., & Wutich, A., "Unity is Strength: Community Resilience in Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria" (2020). https://hazards.colorado.edu/news/research-counts/unity-is-strength-community-resilience-in-puerto-rico-after-hurricane-maria

Marxuach, Sergio M. "Puerto Rico Recovery Task Force." Center for a New Economy (CNE), September 28, 2022. https://grupocne.org/2022/09/28/puerto-rico-recovery-task-force/

Petrun Sayers, E. L., Anthony, K. E., Tom, A., Kim, A. Y., & Armstrong, C. (2023). ‘We will rise no matter what’: community perspectives of disaster resilience following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 51(2), 126–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2022.2069473

Rivera, D. and coauthors, "Assessing the impact of municipal government capacity on recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico." International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (2021). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S221242092100306X

Sou, G. "After Maria" (report). Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester. https://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/hcri/after-maria/after-maria-eng-web.pdf

Zeno-Gonzalez, E., & Butler, W., "The sancocho recovery following Hurricane Maria: NGOs, weak government, and improvised responses in rural Puerto Rico." International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420925006740

On whole-community and community-based disaster management

Clark-Ginsberg, A. (2020). "Disaster risk reduction is not 'everyone's business': Evidence from three countries." International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Clark-Ginsberg, A. (2021). "Risk Technopolitics in Freetown Slums: Why Community-Based Disaster Management Is No Silver Bullet." In J. Remes & A. Horowitz (Eds.), Critical Disaster Studies (pp. 85–96). University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812299724-006

Clark-Ginsberg, A. (2024). "Realizing the Power of Community in Disaster Recovery." Domestic Preparedness.

Clark-Ginsberg, A., & Cecchine, G., (2020). "What's missing from community disaster response? The whole community." The National Interest.

Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., & Davis, I. (2004). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Twigg, J. (2017). "Self-recovery from disasters: An interdisciplinary perspective." UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10033812/1/Twigg%202017.%20Self-recovery%20from%20disasters.%20An%20interdisciplinary%20perspective.pdf

Frameworks and source documents

FEMA, A Whole Community Approach to Emergency Management (PDF).

Government of Puerto Rico & FEMA, Transformation and Innovation in the Wake of Devastation (PDF).