Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

99 institutional analysis (Whaley and Weatherhead, 2014; Ostrom, 2005), common pool resource research (Edwards and Steins, 1999) or socio-ecological systems research (Orach and Schlüter, 2016). The analysis of contextual factors can also expand backward in time and include an analysis of change over time. Therefore, apart from the more or less stable context factors we include social, economic, political and environmental change over time as an influencing force of extra-community framing of community resilience. Disaster risk and hazard research scholars (Birkmann et al., 2010) as well as policy change scholars (Orach and Schlüter, 2016) have identified different dynamics and types of change from gradual, slow-onset change to rapid and abrupt transformation and from iterative to fundamental changes. This can include social change, economic change and policy change as well as changes in the natural environment, e.g. connected to climate change and land degradation. Considering the third boundary condition, a broad variety of disturbances can influence the community and its resilience is partly closely interlinked with the perceived or experienced changes and the specific context factors. As already noted by Wilson (2013), disturbances can have both endogenous (i.e. from within communities, e.g. local pollution event) and exogenous causes (i.e. outside communities, e.g. hurricanes, wars) and include both sudden catastrophic disturbances (e.g. earthquakes) as well as slow-onset disturbances such as droughts or shifts in global trade (for a typology of anthropogenic and natural disturbances affecting community resilience; see Wilson, 2013). In line with Wilson we conclude that communities are never “stable” but are continuously and simultaneously affected and react to disturbances, change processes and various context factors. Therefore, disturbances can not only have severe negative impacts on a community but also trigger change and transformation that might not have activated otherwise. As a result, in empirical applications a clear-cut differentiation between contextual change over time and slow-onset disturbances or disturbances that trigger change is not always possible. 5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 5.1 Interlinkages between the domains and extra-community framing Considering the intertwined components of the proposed framework, research can be guided by acknowledging the complexity of the possible interactions between the resources and capacities, learning and actions domains in shaping community resilience. Therefore, efforts that evaluate these multiple levels; their interactions; and how they operate in different contexts for different hazards can provide an enriching evaluation of community resilience. An example of how the emBRACE framework of community resilience helped to reveal the interrelatedness of socio-political and human resources in the civil protection actions and the importance of social solidarity and trust as important contextual factor is delivered in the case study work in the city of Van, Turkey. Here the exploration of individual resilience after a severe earthquake proved how influential the contextual factors are. The results indicated that the political context played an important role in shaping survivors’ perceptions of their own resilience. Doğulu et al. (2016) shows that community resilience is facilitated when provision of post-quake aid and services is based on equality and trust (and not nepotism and corruption) and not hindered by discrepancy of political views among government bodies, community members and NGOs. Further, the analysis revealed that the earthquake experience in the Marmara region of Turkey in 1999, 12 years earlier influenced the resilience of the community following the Van earthquake, based on learning processes that resulted, for example, in a change in the public disaster management by state organizations as well as the adoption of new legislation. Thus, especially for the state institutions, the impact of a past disturbance may lead to significant changes in disaster risk management, which in turn are likely to contribute to fostering community resilience in Van and beyond (Karanci et al., 2018). This example shows how the framework provides an understanding of the interrelatedness of the three domains and the importance of their interactions in shaping community resilience. Yet, the specific types of relations and interlinkages are case specific, i.e. influenced by various external variables. How to specify these and develop typologies of linkages and relations will need to be investigated in further research. 5.2 Application and operationalization of the framework in indicator-based assessments The emBRACE framework for community resilience was iteratively developed and refined based on the empirical research of the specific local-level systems within the five case studies of emBRACE; thus it is strongly supported by local research findings on community resilience. It was mainly developed to characterize community resilience in a coherent and integrative way. Nonetheless, it was also developed for measuring resilience and is thus a heuristic to be operationalized in the form of an indicator-based assessment. Thus, the framework provides one possible – but empirically legitimized – structure and route with which to select and conceptually locate indicators of community resilience. Within the emBRACE project we derived case-study-specific community resilience indicators aswell as a set of more concise, substantial indicators that are generalizable across the case studies (Becker et al., 2018). The generalizable key indicators include a wider range of indicators frommore quantitative indicators, like the presence of an active third-sector emergency coordination body or the percentage of households in the community that subscribed to an early-warning system, operationalizing the domain of civil protection action, up