Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

211 For the majority of definitions, resilience is anchored within an individual perspective, as it is the outcome which is most often of interest. However, mechanisms that enhance resilience can be portrayed as residing both internally and externally across the different levels of the system. This breadth has important implications for assumptions about the range of resources available when making resilient moves—small changes that can be made quickly and which acknowledge where the young person is starting from. While definitions which conceive of resilience as internal draw largely upon a person’s psychological resources, more ecological approaches which encompass wider social factors also place responsibility upon institutions and society. The different understandings of resilience can be viewed within the context of how resilience research has developed in the “four waves” said to have shaped the field today (see Masten, 2007). Health Inequality and Resilience Following international recognition of the impacts of myriad social inequalities on health (e.g., Black, Morris, Smith, & Townsend, 1980; Lawn et al., 2008) the ethical obligation to tackle health inequalities has been steadily gaining influence as a political issue (Crombie, Irvine, Elliott, &Wallace, 2005; Marmot &Bell, 2012). Health inequalities are defined as “disparities in health (and in its key determinants) that are systematically associated with social advantage/disadvantage” (Braveman & Gruskin, 2003, p. 256). It is not possible to talk meaningfully about health inequalities without talking about ethics and social change. With health and well-being now recognized as social phenomena, questions about how to tackle health inequalities become reframed as questions of how to transform the social structures and systems which produce inequality (Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2008; Wilson & Pickett, 2009). The reduction of health inequalities is now a key strategic priority both in the United Kingdom (Public Health England, 2013) and internationally (World Health Organization, 2014). Within this context, building people’s resilience through an individual focus is increasingly being presented within government policy and supplementary papers as a viable mechanism for the reduction of health challenges (Children and Young People’s Health Outcomes Forum, 2012a, 2012b; Department of Health, 2010a; Public Health England, 2014). In government explanations that privilege lifestyle choice and a person’s internal capacities and abilities, it is the individual who bears the brunt of responsibility for reducing health inequalities (Department of Health, 2010b), for example, pressure on individuals to reduce their alcohol consumption within a society that encourages excessive drinking with extended liquor licenses, “happy hours”, and cheap supermarket offers. Criticisms of Resilience From a social justice perspective, however, responsibility lies to a larger extent with governments, and global decision makers, in their power to determine the economic, social, and health policies that shape the wider socioeconomic conditions. Taking a capabilities perspective, individuals also have agency to affect their own trajectories and those of others (Nussbaum, 2003; Sen, 1999). It is from within the shifting of responsibility for health outcomes from governing institutions onto individuals, and vice versa, that critique of resilience arises. Reacting to the tendency for neoliberal practices and policies to emphasize personal responsibility, while reducing levels of state services, cultural theorists, and social critics consistently warn against an emphasis on promoting resilience (Bottrell, 2013; de Lint & Chazal, 2013; Friedli, 2012, 2013; Harrison, 2012). They identify the concept of resilience as a vehicle for the responsibilization of individuals in place of social structures and governing institutions (e.g., Bottrell, 2013; de Lint & Chazal, 2013; Harrison, 2012; Schmidt, 2015; see Table 2). Little attempt has been made within the resilience literature to offer a response to this critique despite many resilience frameworks working from a risk/adversity perspective (Noltemeyer & Bush, 2013), which may naturally be assumed to capture inequality issues. Political and economic influences may become concealed when higher level structural factors are assumed to be only as influential as more intermediary influences, such as the personal capacities and behavior of individuals. Structural determinants are no longer seen as “the causes of the causes” (Marmot, 2005) when they are being given equal status. This paves the way for internalized explanations to proliferate when lifestyle factors of behavioral origin appear to exert the greatest influence over health and well-being outcomes (Department of Health, 2010b) and a focus on the level of the individual and on higher level structural factors is presented as mutually exclusive. Responsibilization of individuals then occurs when structural accountability is denied and health inequalities come to be understood wholly as the result of these individual choices and internal capacities. To critics, a focus on resilience is seen as synonymous with accepting this internalized explanatory model for health inequalities. Many resilience practitioners’ and researchers’ own understandings and experiences of processes of inequality and disadvantage are not congruent with this model. Particularly for those who identify as members of, or who are working alongside, marginalized and disadvantaged groups, the power of conditions of injustice to constantly undermine caring work does not go unnoticed (Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2005). And in our own projects the impact of structural challenges such as poor housing, transport, and income is often highlighted in the “basics” category of our resilience framework (Hart, Blincow, & Thomas, 2007). By contrast, abstracted from context, resilience takes on the appearance of an independent variable separable from higher level political and economic factors, and structural accountability becomes deniable, or at least ignorable. It is important to note that decontextualization of resilience also fundamentally ignores findings in resilience research, where context is cardinal for adaptive development (Ungar, 2012). As the internalized resilience presented in policy bears little resemblance to the contextualized ecological