It seems to me that once immediate concerns for food and water are met, the next steps divide into a two level effort, especially if there is some form of regional governance.
1. Communities building things for their immediate need and use, such as power production and creation of building materials. Specific communities will be limited to producing what is locally available in the way of raw materials and manufacturing facilities. While you can get a workshop-sized operation up and running fairly easily almost anywhere, scaling that up to industrial output takes time and resources to build the facility, and other skills to operate it.
I agree that fuel will be an early need - without fuel, goods or components cannot be moved very far (for example, moving grown cotton to a gin and weaving mill to turn it into cloth, and then move it further to a clothing factory. Fuel will be needed and wanted both locally and as a commodity for use across the broader area. While many communities may be able to expand food production enough to spare some for alcohol production, having an oil well or two is not an option for most locations.
2. To make this bootstrapping effort somewhat faster, some amount of coordination between communities may be helpful. For example, in the clothing example above, the location with the cotton gin will be told to put it into operation; nearby farming areas may be told (that if they want to have clothes) to grow cotton with any land beyond immediate need food production; a town next to the one with the gin might be told to build a weaving mill (because Central knows it will be next to a cotton gin), and the town next to that one will be told to set up a clothing factory (or the whole chain could be set up in one larger town). My point is that to set up these more complex production chains efficiently, they will need to be planned.
And items NOT built in region 1 because they set up this chain will need to be provided by another region.
The planner can be a government or an entrepreneur, but I'll suggest that a government, able to use both a carrot and a stick, will set this up quicker by imposition than an entrepreneur trying to set it up just on his own.
Uncle Ted
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