Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

214 children and young people and enable them to deal with adversities they may face. With the support of concrete examples from a range of our completed and ongoing research, we outline ways in which others can incorporate resilience theory, interventions, and continuing research practice, into an overarching critical approach which privileges knowledge co-produced by researchers and communities (Hart, Maddison, & Wolff, 2007). Knowledge Co-Production Traditional forms of knowledge production and transfer, such as the objective measurement of outcomes, are unable to sufficiently capture the multifaceted impacts of health inequalities within a dynamic system. This is partly due to insensitivity to the perspectives of communities. Not only does academic knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994) have a strong tendency to decontextualize people and communities, but it is also associated with elitism and status inequality (Hart & Aumann, 2007). We suggest that new forms of contextualized, egalitarian knowledge production and exchange are more appropriate for understanding the multifaceted dynamic nature of adversity, resilience, inequalities, and transformational change. We advocate a peer-reviewed, applied, heterogeneous, problem-centered, trans-disciplinary and change-orientated mode of knowledge, with a critical dimension of being “co-produced by the university and community” (Hart, Maddison, & Wolff, 2007, p. 6). Developed in the context of University–Community partnerships, co-produced knowledge develops richer understandings of resilience, captures its costs, and detects hidden resilience, while also empowering people and communities with the tools and voice to challenge processes of injustice (Bolzan & Gale, 2012). An example from Boingboing concerns a group of young adults with learning disabilities. They are working with PhD student, Anne Rathbone, one of the co-authors of this paper, on a co-productive project that enables them to understand and document their own struggles and capacities in relation to the concept of resilience. They have been highly motivated to develop data collection tools. These include a resilience game that when played, helps the group to order their research data in a way that enables the cognitive functioning of the group to be accommodated. The young people have also been highly motivated to support other young people to develop resilience through making their game available more widely (Hart, 2016a). Finally, they have challenged wider inequalities in access to transport through lobbying Members of Parliament (MP) and transport providers (Hart, 2016a). Looking at resilience through a social justice lens, the synergy between resilience and adversity continually positions researchers and practitioners as the natural advocates for marginalized, excluded, and disadvantaged children and young people, and supporters of their capacities and opportunities for self-advocacy. Co-produced research is necessary to capture the complexities of these groups by enabling a holistic approach. For instance, in our work in schools, we work across the school system in collaboration with all staff groups and levels, as well as students, to understand the resilience mechanisms of students, especially those who are disadvantaged, and to improve their resilience outcomes. In one of our Imagine projects in Greece, undertaken by Elias Kourkoutas and colleagues (Kourkoutas, Georgiadi, & Plexousakis, 2016), school staff, university students, child development center staff, and academics joined with parents of children with complex needs in a resilience-building Community of Practice (CoP). Applying lessons from the resilience research field to their own contexts, including our resilience framework, was the CoP’s focus. This local practice has now influenced the work of other academics in Crete and has also impacted the way that some local councils deliver mental health support. In particular, it has led to more community-based resilience-building practices being adopted and the sharing of expertise between parents, schools staff, local councils, students, and academics becoming routine. University teaching curricula have also been adapted to support trainee teachers to learn about and embed resilience-building approaches through this sharing of expertise. Transformative Practice We propose that resilience work should encompass a “basics” dimension designed specifically to tackle deprivation and associated health inequalities (Hart, Blincow, & Thomas, 2007). At a broader level, the Prilleltenskys’ concepts of epistemic and transformational psychopolitical validity (Prilleltensky, 2003; Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2005; Prilleltensky, Prilleltensky, & Voorhees, 2008) provide a constructive framework for uniting micro- and macro-level factors, through combining understanding of psychological and political influences. Epistemic psychopolitical validity refers to using psychology and politics in understanding social phenomena. Resilience researchers can use this to consider how their understanding of adversity and resilience relates to individual and higher level structural influences, such as asking whether their work includes an understanding of (a) the impact of global, political, and economic forces on the issue at hand; (b) how global, political, and economic forces, as well as social norms, influence the perceptions and experiences of affected individuals and groups; and (c) how the cognitions, behaviors, experiences, feelings, and perceptions of individuals, groups, and entire communities perpetuate or transform the relevant forces and dynamics. They should also consider whether they appreciate how political and psychological powers interact at the personal, relational, and collective levels, affecting the issue at hand. We argue that resilience research and practice has the potential to use psychopolitical validity as a guide toward liberation at the personal, interpersonal, and structural domains. To challenge our own practice and those of others, we might ask questions such as whether interventions (a) promote psychopolitical literacy; (b) educate participants on the timing, components, targets, and dynamics of strategies to overcome oppression; (c) empower participants to take action to address political inequities and social injustice within their relationships, settings, communities, or even internationally; (d) promote solidarity and strategic alliances and coalitions with groups facing similar issues; and (e) account for the subjectivity and psychological limitations of agents of change. In our ongoing work, we have made modest steps in these directions. For example, all 16 individual projects of an overall program,