Community resilience

I have been working on community resilience since 2015, in the context of the Urban Heat project, and ongoing contributions to the community resilience policy scene nationally and in London. I recently drafted a short (2-pages) paper that attempts to define community resilience, and identify ten key principles.

You can access the paper as a PDF here, and here it is below:


What is community resilience?: a proposed definition and set of principles for community resilience.

March 2018

Introduction
The objective of this short paper is to propose a succinct definition and a more comprehensive set of principles for community resilience. The objective of these principles is to support better community resilience in practice. Principles allow a succinct definition to be elaborated and they start to imply particular ways of doing things. These principles draw on official materials and other literature on resilience and community resilience. They also draw on my own Urban Heat research on community resilience, and the broader literatures on community action and good governance. The objective, therefore, is to – in some respects – promote new ways of thinking that can maximise the potential of community resilience in practice.

Proposed definition
Resilience is the capacity of an individual, community or society to plan and prepare for, adapt to, respond to and recover from adverse events and conditions. Community resilience refers to local resilience-related collaboration between local actors, including: statutory responders, the voluntary and community sector (VCS), local businesses and individuals (residents and workers).

Ten proposed principles for community resilience
1.      Community resilience is like resilience in many respects. For instance: it implies action on planning, preparation, response and recovery; it is valuable in the context of both adverse events (such as a flood or a terrorist attack) and adverse social conditions (such as knife crime or deprivation); and, the term can variously refer to a condition, a set of capabilities, a process and a way of doing things.
2.      Community resilience is a helpful term because it emphasises the role of non-statutory (or ‘community’) actors in resilience. However, this should not be taken to mean that community resilience and resilience are different things or separate practices. Rather, it means that the community should be integral to resilience. This implies that a longer term objective might be to reframe institutional understandings and practices relating to resilience itself so that they automatically include the community and the practices of community resilience.
3.      In addition to statutory bodies, community resilience means the involvement of local voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations (such as faith groups, groups that work with vulnerable people and environmental groups), local private sector organisations (such as retailers and other businesses), and local residents and workers.
4.      While much rural community resilience already works through parish councils and with so-called voluntary responders (such as 4x4 clubs), community resilience engagement needs to be broadened to this wider group of actors to maximise its potential.
5.      Community resilience relies upon ongoing collaborative, inclusive and participatory approaches to action on planning, preparation, response and recovery. There is space for a range of approaches to this, but these approaches work best when they are workshop based, and are implemented in ways that give ample time and space for the community representatives’ background knowledge to be developed, and then for their own local knowledge and ideas to develop and grow, and be shared with statutory bodies. My own research provides one model of how this can be achieved.
6.      The purpose of these forms of action with this range of actors is to ensure that planning and action: draws on both local and grass roots knowledge and ideas (especially relating to vulnerable people), and the knowledge and ideas of statutory responders; responds to a wide range of local interests and concerns; and employs the broadest range of capability and capacity that is possible.
7.      My own research shows that, when it is done properly, working in this way with this broad group of actors has the potential to produce powerful ideas, mutual learning and mutual empowerment. To be clear, this is not about statutory bodies empowering the community, community resilience is about everyone empowering everyone else by working together.
8.      Local statutory bodies have a responsibility to co-ordinate and actively support these efforts; community resilience cannot be delegated from statutory organisations to ‘the community’. At the same time, they also have a responsibility to do this in a way that is meaningfully participatory, collaborative and inclusive. This can be very challenging for local statutory bodies and it may mean that third party specialist facilitators (including academics with appropriate experience) are best-pleased to conduct this work on behalf of local statutory responders.
9.      Community resilience is reliant on the statutory and community sectors thriving, and on the good personal relationships and stable cross-sector institutional structures that facilitate effective collaboration. These in turn are reliant on adequate support and funding from regional and national government. Community resilience and resilience are compromised when these things are not in place.
10.   It is important to remember that all communities have a potential for division, conflict and exclusion (as well as the potential for great capability and capacity). Community resilience actions always involve social, temporal and spatial trade-offs between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. It is important that statutory bodies reflect on this and are open about how and why decisions are made.

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