Edited by
Hugh Deeming
HD Research, Bentham, UK
Maureen Fordham
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and
IRDR Centre for Gender and Disaster, UCL, UK
Christian Kuhlicke
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ
Leipzig, Germany; and
University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Lydia Pedoth
Eurac Research
Bolzano, Italy
Stefan Schneiderbauer
Eurac Research
Bolzano, Italy
Cheney Shreve
Western Washington University, Resilience Institute
Washington, USA
This edition first published 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Deeming, Hugh, editor.
Title: Framing community disaster resilience : resources, capacities, learning, and action / edited by Hugh Deeming [and five others].
Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018046972 (print) | LCCN 2018049202 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119165996 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119166016 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119165965 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Emergency management. | Disaster victims. | Community organization. | Community development.
Classification: LCC HV551.2 (ebook) | LCC HV551.2 .F73 2019 (print) | DDC 363.34/7–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046972
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Gunnar Dressler
Thomas Abeling
Climate Impacts and Adaptation, German Environment Agency, Dessau‐Roßlau, Germany
Daniel Becker
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Chloe Begg
Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
Maximilian Beyer
Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
Jörn Birkmann
University of Stuttgart, Institute of Spatial and Regional Planning, Stuttgart, Germany
Denis Chang‐Seng
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, Paris, France
Belinda Davis
Research Affiliate, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Hugh Deeming
HD Research, Bentham, UK
Canay Doğulu
Department of Psychology, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Maureen Fordham
Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and
Centre for Gender and Disaster, Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, London, UK
John Forrester
York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis, University of York, York, UK; and
Stockholm Environment Institute, York Centre, York, UK
Matthias Garschagen
United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security, Bonn, Germany
Nazmul Huq
University of Applied Sciences, Institute for Technology and Resources Management in the Tropics and Subtropics (ITT), Cologne, Germany
Gözde Ikizer
Department of Psychology, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey
Sebastian Jülich
Regional Economics and Development, Economics and Social Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
A. Nuray Karanci
Psychology Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Christian Kofler
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Sylvia Kruse
Chair for Forest and Environmental Policy, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany; and
Regional Economics and Development, Economics and Social Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
Christian Kuhlicke
Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany; and Department of Geography, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Anna Kunath
Büro für urbane Projekte, Leipzig, Germany
Nilufar Matin
Stockholm Environment Institute, York Centre, York, UK
Sebastien Nobert
Department of Geography, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; and Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds, UK
Dilek Özceylan‐Aubrecht
Independent Researcher, USA
Lucy Pearson
Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, London, UK
Lydia Pedoth
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Mark Pelling
Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK
Marcello Petitta
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Marco Pregnolato
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Fabrice Renaud
United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security, Bonn, Germany
Stefan Schneiderbauer
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Justin Sharpe
Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK
Cheney Shreve
Western Washington University, Resilience Institute, Bellingham, Washington, USA
Agnieszka Elzbieta Stawinoga
Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Åsa Gerger Swartling
Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm Centre, Stockholm, Sweden
Richard Taylor
Stockholm Environment Institute, Oxford Centre, Oxford, UK
Simon Taylor
Engineering and Environment, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Jan Wolfertz
United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security, Bonn, Germany
Hugh Deeming
HD Research, Bentham, UK
‘Natural’ disasters are not natural. This has been stated by many researchers and practitioners from as early as the eighteenth century onwards (O’Keefe et al. 1976; Blaikie et al. 1994; Kelman 2010; Paravicini and Wiesmann 2016). The key aspects influencing the extent of disastrous losses or damages depend to a large degree on power and access to resources as well as on human behaviour – individual and collective. They are strongly connected to societal norms and values and were characterised as ‘social calculus’ by Smith (2005). This social calculus comprises underlying causes for vulnerabilities, the capacities to prevent and to prepare ahead of hazardous events, the susceptibilities during crisis or the capability to recover in a timely way in their aftermath (Blaikie et al. 1994). During the last decade, the recognition of these facts has found its way into disaster literature. However, activities and measures aiming to reduce disaster impacts often still have natural and environmental processes as their primary focus. To complement this, efforts aiming to build social resilience are now considered relevant to reduce disaster risk and are consequently at the core of Priority 3 of the disaster risk reduction (DRR) focused Sendai Framework 2015–2030 (UNISDR 2015).
The term resilience has a long tradition in engineering and construction but also in art, law, literature and psychology (Alexander 2013). Although it had been introduced as an applied concept in systems ecology by Holling in 1973, it was not until the early years of the twenty‐first century that the concept of resilience became a buzzword in both academic and more policy‐oriented contexts. As part of these attitudinal shifts, we saw the term vulnerability (perhaps the catchword of the later years of the twentieth century), with its sometimes negative connotations, replaced by the word ‘resilience’, seen by many as a more solution‐oriented approach. This almost ubiquitous capture is not without its critics, many of whom see its ascendant position as a depoliticisation project (Cannon and Müller‐Mahn 2010). The term resilience is now on everyone's lips, whether in ecology or economy, in science or policy, in disaster risk reduction or climate change adaptation.
In disaster and climate adaptation research, the resilience concept has given a strong impetus to bridging theory and practice, and emphasising the importance of social and societal aspects in explanation and reduction of negative consequences. However, due to its continuously increasing contexts and purposes, the term has lost sharpness or precision. The number of circumstances in which resilience is used is almost proportional to the number of ways in which it is interpreted (Brand and Jax 2007). Consequently, the concept of resilience has been criticised for being fuzzy and even counterproductive by allowing dominant power structures to allocate liabilities and the burden to deal with vulnerabilities to less powerful communities (see for example Tanner et al. 2017).
This book is about community resilience and tackles the question of how community resilience can be described, explained, assessed and strengthened within the context of natural hazard events and processes. The book can help to (re‐)focus the lens of resilience applications on the essentials required for an in‐depth understanding of underlying causes of harm and pressures aggravating successful resilience building. It places particular emphasis on the significance of community‐related aspects of resilience such as the sense of belonging and commitment, social networks, the sharing of perspectives and mutual actions in geographical locations. However, this, almost universally positive, reading of the ‘community’ concept must also be balanced by the need to avoid homogenising communities, recognising that their inherent social diversity leads inevitably to inequalities of experience and access to resources.
We very much hope that this book contributes to both a better understanding of the theoretical background of community resilience and to the awareness of the need to empower and strengthen communities in their effort to deal with natural events. Except for the chapters dealing with the theoretical concept, the contributions of this book have been achieved together with communities and are strongly based on their participation and input.
The content of this book draws strongly on the activities and achievements of the project emBRACE – Building Resilience Amongst Communities in Europe. emBRACE was a European Commission‐funded Research Project that ran from 2011 to 2015. Its consortium members are placed in six different European countries and cover various academic disciplines from medical science and psychology via social and economic geography to risk research and emergency management. The emBRACE project aimed to build resilience to disasters amongst communities in Europe. Its work was based on the awareness that for the achievement of this objective, it is vital to merge forces in research knowledge, networking and practices. emBRACE tasks therefore covered both academic aspects, such as: framework development and the identification of key dimensions of resilience across a range of disciplines and domains; the operationalisation of theoretical concepts by means of indicators; and the analysis of community characteristics, networks, behaviour and practices in specific test cases.
The most relevant findings of this work – particularly those concerning the generation of new scientific knowledge as well as experience and guidance for assessing and building community resilience in practice – are reported in this book. The applied methodology of the various contributions range from targeted data analysis of the impacts of past hazardous events and resilience indicators to agent‐based modelling and social network analysis. The context for resilience analysis was provided by means of five test cases whose communities are facing impacts triggered by different hazards, namely: river floods in Central Europe (Germany), earthquake in Turkey, landslides in South Tyrol (Italy), heatwaves in London (UK) and combined fluvial and pluvial floods in Northern England (UK).
The book is divided into three main parts. The first part covers the conceptual and theoretical background required to fully understand the complexity of community resilience to hazardous events or disasters. The second part tackles the issue of data and indicators to report on past events, assess current situations and tackle the dynamics of community resilience. The third part focuses on empirical analysis to back the resilience concept and to test the usage of indicators for describing community resilience. Within this part, the contributions reflect the experience of the pilot case work. These three main scientific parts are followed by concluding remarks which reflect upon the emBRACE project journey and the rationale for our approach.
The resilience concept – is it a paradigm or science, or is it just a tool to guide the design of disaster risk reduction intervention objectives and intentions? Given the term’s ubiquity, it is perhaps surprising that this important distinction has not been resolved. However, its very indeterminacy is arguably a benefit for a boundary concept such as resilience which embraces many disciplinary fields, approaches and philosophies, and typifies so‐called ‘wicked problems’. The next section comprises four chapters which underpin the emBRACE project team’s approach to community disaster resilience and discusses some of the core debates in this diverse field; the theoretical and conceptual exposition is entwined with the methodological.
The emBRACE project team set out to develop an approach which addressed some of the limitations of the dominant framing of resilience (the social ecological systems (SES) approach), including a lack (at the time) of empirical evidence, and to build a framework of sufficient sophistication to incorporate explanatory power and yet sufficiently accessible for practical application by non‐academics.
Is resilience an outcome or a process? The literature abounds with descriptive/technical approaches over critical/social ones, with a concomitant absence of power analyses and the politics of resilience. The lack of engagement with critical social theory produces resilience as resistance and an equilibrium model or approach, with a static perspective. The benefit of this approach is that it does allow easier definition of quantifiable boundaries and thresholds. However, the emBRACE team was keen to find ways to capture a more dynamic, process‐oriented conceptualisation to highlight reorganisation, transformation and learning.
Resilience is now recognised as a boundary term or object which brings together normally separate perspectives, people, professions and practices and creates a space for dialogue. It promises integrative power, reflecting the interdependence of social, economic and environmental systems. Furthermore, in some readings, it offers transformative potential in social systems to address some of the root causes of disaster risk.
On the other hand, it carries with it widespread charges of conceptual vagueness; this is especially the case in its transition from ecological and engineering approaches to critical social sciences. It still faces a dearth of data and appropriate indicators for modelling and the early absence of empirical data weakened support for its application. However, its main challenge is to make something meaningful out of its evolution from a static equilibrium concept to a heuristic for social change. How to measure something in flux which undergoes constant change and transformation?
The emBRACE team faced this challenge of dealing with the complexity inhered within the resilience concept. The sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA), while less familiar to those outside the development field and working within the European context, offers an established (although not uncontested) framework that has also been applied to the disaster context. The fundamental elements of a livelihoods approach include people‐centred, multilevel, multisectoral, and locally embedded conceptions and practices. Thus, it offers a radical alternative to top‐down, expert systems perspectives. At the simplest level, it presents a checklist of key components necessary to comprehend people’s experience and the context in which they face, cope with or adapt to hazards, shocks, and disasters. These are variously characterised as human, social, natural, financial, and physical ‘capitals’ or ‘assets’ or, in the emBRACE case, ‘resources and capacities’. The additions of ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ are later refinements that are also sometimes present. The general structure of SLA is now applied quite widely to resilience thinking but without acknowledgement of its theoretical roots.
The emBRACE approach aimed to go beyond the pervasive definition of resilience as ‘bouncing back’ post disaster because this suggests a limiting response mode which does little to transform people’s conditions of risk or their capacity for adaptive change. This raises a question concerning how (or if) people translate experience or knowledge to action and what is the role of learning, in particular social learning which goes beyond the individual and is embedded within social networks. Social learning is not a passive absorption of information based on the contested deficit model but active in its demands for critical reflection. The emBRACE project’s approach to social learning for community resilience is via co‐produced and shared learning experiences through social networks to enable behavioural change. These knowledge exchange and support networks work with both informal and formal mechanisms.
Social learning is one of the strategies or mechanisms which create the potential for communities to ‘bounce forwards’. This is most clearly achieved through a process of transformative learning which signals a change in the worldview or frame of reference of an individual or a group with a concomitant change in adaptive behaviour and to social structures.
The philosophy behind emBRACE was to employ the widest possible participatory approaches and not follow ‘business as usual’ pathways. This inevitably introduces complexity yet we regarded the underestimation of the social and overestimation of the technical/ecological within the SES approach and its lack of social transformative capacity as fundamental flaws. We aimed for a real level of transdisciplinarity, going beyond the dominance position of environmental change professionals, and based on better integration and also greater participation. It is self‐organising and self‐governing within communities which create the conditions for resilience – as an emergent property of the community – not something created by outsiders and external experts.
The emBRACE approach seeks to unite social and behavioural resilience research with technical and engineering dimensions through a biophysical modelling approach. It aims to do that with a nuanced understanding and explicit conceptualisation of community (although community is a contested term in much community resilience work, and definitions are generally absent). Our aim is to integrate different types of knowledge (technical, traditional, and local) and generate shared understanding and co‐learning. The complexity of the resilience concept and the transdisciplinarity of our interpretation demand multiple methods and a melding of theoretical and scientific concepts with practitioners’ and community members’ accessibility. We hope our emBRACE Resilience Framework (see Chapter 6) is a useful heuristic.
Chapter 2 sets out the theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and measurement challenges presented by community disaster resilience. It outlines the dissatisfaction with descriptive concepts which lack power analyses and the emBRACE team’s search for a normative interpretation encompassing social transition, learning, and innovation. This includes consideration of the implications of a transition from the natural to the social sciences and the ability of the resilience concept to represent complex, dynamic processes.
Chapter 3 addresses livelihoods approaches in contemporary resilience frameworks. It examines the understanding of how communities can best mobilise resources and capacities to prepare, plan, and adapt to risks. This chapter examines the underpinnings of the SLA, drawing out key criticisms and linkages between livelihoods thinking and resilience, and discusses opportunities for resilience to progress the livelihoods agenda and vice versa.
Chapter 4 sets out what is meant by social learning in the context of European DRR and how we have interpreted and applied it in emBRACE. This analysis discounts knowledge deficit models in favour of social learning which has the potential to be socially transformative; no longer just ‘bouncing back’ but ‘bouncing forwards’. The chapter includes references to the emBRACE empirical studies from the UK and Turkey which are presented in greater detail below.
Chapter 5 spans the social‐natural‐technical‐policy frameworks within which the emBRACE project work can be considered and presents its philosophical position. This is characterised as a structured, multisectoral, multimethod, and multilevel approach which was piloted in the emBRACE empirical case studies.