Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

215 on which we are working, involve some form of activity designed to challenge adversity conditions. We described above how a group of young adults with learning disabilities are tackling inequalities in transport provision. Emerging findings from other projects suggest that through lived experience, practitioner and academic partners can work together with an inequalities-focused approach to resilience-building. For example, in the building resilience for well-being and recovery course, we developed a session focused on “changing the odds” in which learners shared experiences of challenging adversity and developed action plans. One participant highlighted discriminatory attitudes toward people with mental health problems in her church, and with the support of the learning group developed an action plan involving challenging church authorities to take the issue seriously and to circulate educational material. To overcome the dilemma of agency and responsibility, one possibility is to move away from modernist notions of agency, which privilege voluntary, deliberate, or conscious efforts (Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012), toward a focus on actions as practices (Aranda & Hart, 2014). In terms of health inequalities, resilience, and ecology, this means moving away from focusing on individuals as sources of action, or on structures as external forces. Instead, accounts of resilience, capacities, or capabilities are intimately entwined with norms, practices, and institutions, which in turn are shaped and modified by those enactments. Practices, rather than individuals, become the unit of analysis. A practice lens therefore suggests that no one, single factor controls change, including practitioners themselves who do not exist in isolation (and in this theoretical sense of the term “practitioner”, we mean anyone). Yet opportunities for intervention or change remain possible; practitioners can operate in a number of ways to influence elements of practice (Shove et al., 2012). This entails exploring how practices spread through research, intervention, or organization. Any attempt to understand resilient moves must acknowledge that these attempts are set within a nexus of global health practices seeking to address or tackle inequalities. Research should pay attention to the materiality of policies, reports, public health documents, and strategies; for instance, here in England that would include the recent government reforms now influencing the National Health Service (NHS), and reconfigurations of informal and formal health and social care services. It is worth holding in mind that, as we argued earlier, responsibilization of individuals occurs when structural accountability is denied, and health inequalities come to be understood wholly as the result of individual lifestyle choices and capacities. Participation Co-production of knowledge means committing to work with and alongside individuals and communities to better understand their adversity context, including the impacts of inequality, and resilience-building as an ecological process. Particular attention should be paid to issues of power and power relations, how power imbalances manifest and how they can be challenged in resilience research and practice development. The relationship between power and knowledge and the existence of different types of knowledge and competing perspectives should be acknowledged. We should be sensitive to how various types of knowledge are valued and constructed and for what purpose; and how they are used, exchanged, and managed (Hart, Davies, et al., 2013). We acknowledge that fully engaging people and communities in research requires resources, effort, time, and management, and often the practicalities are challenging, but we urge researchers to consider the value that co-produced knowledge adds to understandings of resilience. The simple but powerful way we incorporate this into our research agenda is through inviting study participants to become co-researchers and take an active role in the whole research process, in a way that is appropriate to their needs. In this we are not denying the complex power issues (and indeed practicalities) involved in making this happen. However, as a group we are committed to co-productive research and are constantly striving to improve our practice in terms of shared ownership and accountability. Empowerment Working with and alongside people and communities not only involves an undertaking to celebrate capability and build capacity as we share knowledge and practice but also provides potential to empower people and groups to challenge their adversity context. However, we must be especially careful around the meaning and use of empowerment. Within government policy, empowerment is presented as “empowering individuals to make healthier choices” (Department of Health, 2010b, p. 2). However, when we refer to empowerment we are interested in the emancipatory potential. In the context of resilience and inequalities, this means supporting individuals, groups, and communities to increase their control over the events that determine their health and well-being in the first place (World Health Organization, 2014). We also see ways in which more collective community-based understandings of empowerment, represented by the disability rights slogan of “nothing about us without us,” has been reinvented into the more individual “no decision about me without me” (Department of Health, 2010c, p. 13), reflecting the need for involvement rather than protection. For example, another PhD student in our group, Stephanie Coombe, supported the development of a resilience-building approach involving the whole-school community, including children (Hart, 2016b). Changes were made to the school day that meant children from disadvantaged backgrounds were able to make choices that increased their chances of going on to further studies or gaining employment. They could choose and/or be paid to develop clubs for hobbies and work experience placements, activities that the school did not previously provide, but which, as reported in the literature, are readily available to more advantaged school children (Broh, 2002; Farb & Matjasko, 2012; Stewart, Sun, Patterson, Lemerle, & Hardie, 2004). Inclusion Many of our teamof resilience researchers and practitioners are drawn to the field precisely because of our own challenging backgrounds.