Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

168 change adaptation is a priority for many government and health and social development organizations; (2) resilience is increasingly seen as part and parcel of climate change adaptation efforts; and (3) lots of time, money, and labor are being invested in promoting resilience globally. Furthermore, the general consensus among the scientific community that there will be a long-term gradual increase in at least some types of extreme weather events (Alley et al. 2007) is a strong indication that these types of resilience promotion efforts will continue and possibly increase into the foreseeable future. BOTH RESEARCHERS AND PRACTITIONERS HAVE ROLES TO PLAY IN BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE Given the substantial financial outlays represented by many of these efforts to strengthen resilience, naturally the funding institutions and agencies will invest considerable time and energy into careful, thoughtful planning and into developing appropriate mechanisms to monitor implementation progress. Implementers of resilience-promotion projects and programs will pay close attention to the level of quality and completion of planned infrastructure, the average increases in income among local poor, and the square kilometers of restored mangroves, and other key performance indicators, as they should. Some initiatives may even estimate the expected benefits in terms of helping communities cope with severe weather events or other effects of climate change. Whether or not these are appropriate or meaningful measures of resilience is less clear. This is where analytical resilience research has a key role to play. To start, a review of relevant research articles and case studies may help practitioners who implement resilience programs to clarify their own definition of resilience and to identify examples of factors that have been demonstrated to promote resilience in similar communities or circumstances. Even taking the first step of translating resilience as an abstract concept into a specific, measurable framework with concrete examples may yield valuable insights for designing and implementing a project or program. Similarly, practitioners may benefit from existing evidence-based tools, such as those listed on the Resilience Alliance website (http: /www.resalliance.org ), when thinking about how to practically assess the resilience of social-ecological systems and develop strategies to enhance it. Thoughtful community engagement is also critical to ensuring that the planned resilience initiatives complement and do not undermine pre-existing preferences, norms, and behaviors. Local residents understand how their neighbors think and behave in a way that could potentially take outsiders years to learn. Accessing that knowledge and enlisting the support of key community stakeholders is especially important for initiatives addressing climate change, since the proposed changes are often immediate while the anticipated consequences may be far into the future. Also, communities may have different views about which factors will be most important for strengthening their own resilience. In some cases, they may agree that what is needed most are more retaining walls or restoration of coastal mangroves, but in other cases it might be something completely different. Yet despite the potential value of drawing from the available research and resources and seeking substantive input from communities to design and implement these initiatives, these steps seem to be frequently omitted, or addressed only perfunctorily. Because a large portion of development assistance funding is delivered through 2-to-5-year projects with predetermined objectives and deliverables, theremay be insufficient time or insufficient contract flexibility for implementing agencies towork with communities to develop a shared framework for assessing and building resilience. Although “local stakeholder engagement” or the equivalent is almost guaranteed to be included as a contract requirement for many of these projects, the timelines and pressure to commence implementation as soon as possible mean that the de facto intent of this step is often to get endorsement or “buy-in” from the appropriate local leaders. Hiring local staff to lead or guide project implementation can ameliorate, but not eliminate, these limitations. The major risk of this type of superficial embrace of resilience as a concept is that we may end up with well-funded and well-intentioned initiatives that ultimately miss their mark because they lack a coherent, evidence-based design or are out of step with local customs and context. As Strauch et al. (2008) note, for instance, one critical limitation of many initiatives to enhance resilience in sub-Saharan Africa through water-related infrastructure is that they tend to focus on large-scale, one-off projects that fail to take into account the key “drivers of change” in social-ecological systems, including the ecosystem, people and technology, local knowledge, and property rights. INCREASING THE PRACTICAL IMPACTS OF RESILIENCE RESEARCH DOES NOT NEED TO BE COMPLICATED The key question is how we can translate insights from resilience research into proactive efforts led by communities to enhance resilience-promoting factors or characteristics. There will likely never be a single, sure-fire approach, but acknowledging that this is important would be a start. There is room for improvement within both the researcher and practitioner communities. Although some researchers’ primary objective may be to contribute to the academic body of knowledge on resilience, a worthy secondary objective would be to help guide efforts to translate that knowledge into actions that improve people’s lives. If practitioners without a research background are to draw meaningful insights from academic articles about resilience, researchers may want to