Chapter 11 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience concludes the book be presenting key lessons from the study and provides recommendations to practitioners and disaster scholars who are working towards greater community-resilience and learning so that communities can prepare for and withstand extreme events in the future.

Disasters at the local level can serve as focusing events that increase agenda attention related to disaster response, recovery, and preparedness issues. Increased agenda attention can lead to policy changes and also to learning. The degree and type of learning that occurs after a disaster within a government organization can matter to policy outcomes related to individual, household, and community-level risks and resilience. Local governments oversee disaster planning and recovery and are the first line of disaster response. They also bear the burden of performing long-term disaster recovery and planning for future events. And yet, scholars do not have a clearly articulated framework for understanding if, how, and with what effect local governments learn after a disaster strikes their community. Drawing from analyses conducted over a five-year period of multiple disaster-affected communities in Colorado, USA, a framework of learning after disaster within local governments is presented.