Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

98 Fifth, dissemination is integral for spreading ideas, practices, tools, techniques and values that have proven to meet risk management objectives across social and policy communities. Sixth and finally, monitoring and review refers to the existence of processes and capacity that can monitor the appropriateness of existing risk management regimes in anticipation of changing social and technological, environmental, policy and hazard and risk perception contexts. The Turkish case study on earthquakes revealed that an earthquake experience in one region of the country led to learning, mostly by the state, to changes and to the adoption of new legislation and new organization for disaster management. This experience seemed to have very robust effects on attitudes towards disasters, changing the focus from disaster management to disaster risk management (Balamir, 2002). The same change process seemed to apply to individuals as well but to a smaller extent, in that an earthquake experience led to an increase in hazard awareness and preparedness (as would be predicted based on classical hazards theory; Kates, 1971). The Italian case study in the Alpine village of Badia focuses on the perception of risks and losses as one element of resilience learning. The findings reveal that, even though people living in Badia have high risk awareness, many did not expect or prepare for an event. The interpretation of the different risk behaviour profiles shows that people who perceived themselves to be under risk of future landslide events had either personally experienced a landslide event in the past or participated in the clean-up work after the landslide event in 2012. Results from comparing the two groups of inhabitants affected by the landslide event 2012 and not affected in 2012 point in the same direction, showing that personal experience, not only recent but also past experience, together with active involvement in the response phase, lead to a higher risk perception especially when thinking about the future (Pedoth et al., 2018). 4.2 Extra-community framing of community resilience 4.2.1 Disaster risk governance In the proposed characterization of community resilience with respect to natural hazards, the three core domains – resources and capacities, actions and learning – are embedded in two extra-community frames. The first frame is that of formal and informal disaster risk governance, which comprises laws, policies and responsibilities of disaster risk management at the local, regional, national and supra-national levels. From the case study research it became clear that community resilience and its constituent resources and capacities, action and learning processes are strongly interacting with existing formal and informal laws, policies and responsibilities of civil protection and risk management more generally (e.g. flood mapping as per the German National Water Act and the EU Flood Directive). Responsibilities relate to the actors and stakeholders involved in disaster risk management. The wider ideas of risk governance to the specific context of a community involves focus on the interaction between communities’ resources and capacities and actions as well as their learning processes. This is related to the specific framework by which responsibilities, modes of interaction and ways to participate in decision-making processes in disaster risk management are spelt out. The responsibilization agendas in the two case studies in Cumbria, England and Saxony, Germany may serve as an example. In both case studies community actions are being influenced by the downward-pressing responsibilization agenda, which is encompassed, for example, within Defra’s “Making Space for Water” strategy for Great Britain and Saxony’s water law in Germany, the latter of which obliges citizens to implement mitigation measures. This explicitly parallels Walker and Westley’s call to “push power down to the local community level where sense-making, self-organization and leadership in the face of disaster were more likely to occur if local governments felt accountable for their own responses” (2011:4). The case study work showed that this not only relates to local governments (Begg et al., 2015; Kuhlicke et al., 2016) but also to the individual citizens potentially affected by natural hazards (Begg et al., 2016). More specifically, Begg et al. (2016) found that if the physical and psychological consequences are perceived as being low with regard to their most recent flood experiences, then respondents tend to accept the attribution of responsibility towards individual citizens and also report higher response efficacy (i.e. the respondents have the feeling they can reduce flood risk through their own actions) if they have taken personal mitigation measures prior to the flood event. In addition, respondents who have taken personal mitigation measures are more likely to report higher response efficacy than those who have not taken such actions and also agree with the responsibility attributed to them. In other words, if respondents took personal mitigation measures before the flood and did not experience severe consequences as a result of the flood, they are likely to agree with statements which support citizen responsibility and report high response efficacy. This shows that resilience action and learning processes are always embedded in the broader formal and informal risk governance settings. 4.2.2 Indirect hazard-related context, social–ecological change and disturbances As a second extra-community framing we consider three dimensions as influential boundary conditions for community resilience: first the social, economic, political and environmental context; second, social, economic, political and environmental change over time; and third diverse types of disturbances. The first dimension of indirect hazard-related boundary conditions for community resilience is the social, economic, political and environmental/bio-physical context. This includes contextual factors and conditions around the community itself, requiring the expansion of the analysis of community resilience to take into account the wider political and economic factors that directly or indirectly influence the resilience of the community. In different concepts and theories these contextual factors have been addressed, e.g. in