Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

138 At the community level, Norris et al. (2008) identified four primary sets of capacities that enhance community resilience, including economic development, social capital, information and communication, and community competence. Economic development refers to economic growth, stability of livelihoods, and equal distribution of resources within the population (Adger 1999). Social capital refers to networks of social supports, bonding within community, bridging between communities, and networking between communities and government bodies (Adger 2003, Pelling and High 2005, Mathbor 2007). Information and communication refer to the system and infrastructure for informing the public because people need accurate information about danger and behavioral options for them to act quickly. Community competence is about the capacity of the community to learn, work together flexibly, and solve problems creatively. These contributing factors should be measurable in the practical context. Most researchers attempt to define the concept of resilience; very little research operationalizes it in practice. Cumming et al. (2005) note that resilience is a multidimensional concept, so it is difficult to operationalize in practice. Coping with this problem, they develop a “surrogate approach” as an indirect way of measuring resilience (Carpenter et al. 2005: 967). Marschke and Berkes (2006) adopted the surrogate approach to operationalize resilience from livelihood perspectives in rural Cambodian villages using a subjective well-being approach. However, Marschke and Berkes (2006) only explore the well-being of households and communities in a qualitative manner; they do not attempt to quantify resilience indicators at a household level. It is argued that well-being is what people think and feel about their life or subjective well-being (Copestake and Camfield 2009). The subjective well-being approach was widely accepted in poverty and livelihood studies in developing countries (Narayan et al. 2000). However, little is known about different dimensions of households’ resilience to floods in a real “living with floods” context. Knowledge of the ability of households to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods reflects their resilience, but there is no study that operationalizes the concept in the MRD. METHODS Three communes (Phu Duc, Thanh My Tay, and Trung An) were selected for this study to represent different flood and socioeconomic conditions of the MRD (Figure 2). The socioeconomic conditions and livelihood activities of the three locations are represented in Table 1. Fig. 2. The Mekong River Delta and location of the study sites. Source: Quang (editor) 2012.