Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

217 funding in the United Kingdom is being increasingly given over to work on big data, with quantitative research, particularly randomized controlled trials, held up as the gold standard against which all other methods are judged. However, despite this larger picture, there is some room for optimism. For instance, even the National Institute for Health Research, which lauds randomized controlled trials, has a powerful Patient and Public Involvement Agenda, which at least in theory enables service users to lead research projects drawing on expertise gained through their service user identity. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, co-productive research has been animated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities Programme. We are involved in this through our own co-productive research project, Imagine, and by contributing to the Connected Communities’ wider community of co-researchers, which sees us meet regularly to share ideas and develop collaborative practices (http:/www. boingboing.org.uk ). The Economic and Social Research Council also takes the involvement of people with lived experience seriously with, for example, new initiatives being developed with recourse to service users’ experiences. Of course there are many miles to go with this agenda, and we constantly challenge our own practices. Furthermore, many aspects of the wider policy context are not favorable to such initiatives at present. However, as we have argued above and elsewhere, there are always practices to be found that start in one arena and get shifted to others, including government policy agendas. The Boingboing community of practice approach is one such grassroots initiative that has traveled beyond its local context and which hopes to sustain itself for the future. Some of the practical steps we attempt to live by are outlined below. Uniting resilience research with an inequalities agenda is where we see our community developing and we hope that others will join us. Practical moves that can be made in current research practice include - increasing transparency of research, including a clear conceptualization of resilience; - conducting academic research that advocates for people facing embedded societal inequalities and is focused on challenging inequitable policy agendas; - including detailed demographic information about research participants in resilience-based initiatives; - justifying the use of non-representative populations; - encouraging the research community to undertake co-produced research with underrepresented groups that are more challenging to work with; - increasing availability and accessibility of resilience measures; - developing co-produced research and practice designs, with clear skills development pathways for all co-researchers; - engaging in co-produced research containing socially transformative rather than solely personally transformative elements; - initiating research that shares research goals, processes, publications, and financial resources between academic and community partners; - facilitating supported agency, and co-identifying and co-delivering responses to adversities (to address societal inequalities, or tackle prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping); - investigating the impact of inequalities/social disadvantage at multiple levels on processes of resilience-building, remembering that resilience is concerned with overcoming adversity, while also potentially changing or even dramatically transforming (aspects of) that adversity; - drawing on existing research in allied disciplines (e.g., policy, health disparities, inequalities) when designing resilience research programs to inform the wider socio-ecological context; and - taking every opportunity to influence research policy makers and help them understand the relationship between inequalities and resilience.