Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how Puerto Rican households and communities responded to food, energy, and water insecurity after Hurricane María, highlighting autogestión as residents filled state gaps and built resilience amid ongoing infrastructure failures.

Presentation long abstract

After a disaster, critical infrastructure systems—such as interconnected food, energy, and water (FEW) systems—face disruption, leaving households and communities vulnerable to resource insecurity. These disruptions not only exacerbate material scarcity but also lead to physical and psychological distress. When the state fails to respond, residents, community leaders, and grassroots organizations assume an important role in ensuring resource security. Drawing on 50 interviews with residents from urban and rural communities in Puerto Rico, this work analyzes household and community-level responses to food, energy, and water insecurity following Hurricane Maria (2017) and efforts to build community resilience eight years after this event. As the state abandons the ethics of social responsibility, this work employs political ecology to examine the culture of autogestión, or self-management, in Puerto Rico. By focusing on the factors that encourage autogestión at the household level, we also explore how these arrangements are positioned within broader socio-political discussions about the roles and responsibilities of the state in relation to critical infrastructure resilience and household FEW resources security.