Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

124 Tanzania. To narrow the focus, we concentrated our survey questions on household-level disaster resilience, more specifically, resilience to flood risk.[1] Our survey was based on a standardized and widely used framing of climate resilience (Aldunce et al. 2015, Bahadur et al. 2015), comprising of three core capacities. The first capacity used in our subjective framework relates to a household’s ability to prepare, more specifically, to anticipate and reduce the impact of climate variability and extremes through preparedness and planning, often by making use of relevant information and early warning (Bahadur et al. 2015). The second capacity relates to a household’s ability to recover. This is primarily associated with its ability to absorb and cope with the impacts of climate variability and extremes, often through maintaining core functions or livelihood activities (Sundres and Birnbaum 2003, Folke et al. 2010). The third capacity relates to a household’s ability to adapt, more specifically, to adjust, modify, or change its characteristics or actions to moderate potential damage or take advantage of new opportunities that arise (Jones et al. 2010). We administered a single question to address each of these three capacities (Table 1). The three items are conceptually distinct, well understood by respondents, easy to use and, as we show below, were found to be relatively independent of one another. Each capacity question used a standardized unipolar Likert scale with four response alternatives. The approach builds on methods used to assess social resilience in individual communities (see Marshall and Marshall 2007, Nguyen and James 2013, Seara et al. 2016), as well as similar approaches used to evaluate subjective capacities in related fields such as subjective well-being (OECD 2013), risk perception (Mills et al. 2016), and psychological resilience (Connor and Davidson 2003). Table 1. Resilience-related questions administered through the national survey. Although each capacity question is administered via a single-item, as per the approach adopted by Béné et al. (2016a,b)[2], we see resilience as multidimensional; therefore it is not amenable to being measured via a stand-alone question. It is important to underscore that none of the three capacity questions should be interpreted as representing resilience overall; it is for this reason that we refer to them as “resilience-related capacities” throughout. Instead they should be considered to represent several core functions deemed necessary to support household resilience. This study is primarily exploratory. Although we seek to test a research question, given this is a novel area of academic interest with few other studies applied at the national level, we are primarily interested in understanding the dynamics of subjective resilience and working toward further validation and refinement of the tools applied. We hope that future work can build on these research insights and seek more confirmatory and experimental approaches, including the use of scales with numerous, replicative items (see Jones 2017). Survey instrument The questions were administered via a nationally representative survey in Tanzania, namely the Sauti za Wananchi (Voices of Citizens) longitudinal survey managed by the Tanzanian nongovernmental organization Twaweza and surveying company Ipsos Synovate. The survey is composed of two phases. First, a baseline survey was carried out through traditional face-to-face interviews using a multistage stratified sampling approach (Twaweza 2013). A sample of 2000 households in 200 enumeration areas were surveyed in October 2012, using a sampling frame designed to be representative of the Tanzanian population aged 18 years and older based on the 2012 Tanzania Population and Housing Census (NBS 2013). At this point, all households were given a mobile phone and solar charger. The second phase consists of a series of mobile telephone surveys with the same sampled households as in the baseline (Details of