Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

92 Conceptualizing Community Resilience to Natural Hazards –the emBRACE Framework by Sylvia Kruse, Thomas Abeling, Hugh Deeming, Maureen Fordham, John Forrester, Sebastian Jülich, A. Nuray Karanci, Christian Kuhlicke, Mark Pelling, Lydia Pedoth and Stefan Schneiderbauer This article was originally published in Natural Hazards and Earth SystemSciences , 17(12), 2017. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-2321-2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0 US) license ABSTRACT The level of community is considered to be vital for building disaster resilience. Yet, community resilience as a scientific concept often remains vaguely defined and lacks the guiding characteristics necessary for analysing and enhancing resilience on the ground. The emBRACE framework of community resilience presented in this paper provides a heuristic analytical tool for understanding, explaining and measuring community resilience to natural hazards. It was developed in an iterative process building on existing scholarly debates, on empirical case study work in five countries and on participatory consultation with community stakeholders where the framework was applied and ground-tested in different contexts and for different hazard types. The framework conceptualizes resilience across three core domains: (i) resources and capacities, (ii) actions and (iii) learning. These three domains are conceptualized as intrinsically conjoined within a whole. Community resilience is influenced by these integral elements as well as by extra-community forces comprising disaster risk governance and thus laws, policies and responsibilities on the one hand and on the other, the general societal context, natural and human-made disturbances and system change over time. The framework is a graphically rendered heuristic, which through application can assist in guiding the assessment of community resilience in a systematic way and identifying key drivers and barriers of resilience that affect any particular hazard-exposed community. 1. INTRODUCTION Community resilience has become an important concept for characterizing and measuring the abilities of populations to anticipate, absorb, accommodate or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner (Patel et al., 2017; Almedom, 2013; Berkes and Ross, 2013; Deeming et al., 2014; Walker and Westley, 2011). This goes beyond a purely social–ecological systems understanding of resilience (e.g. Armitage et al., 2012:9) by incorporating social subjective factors, e.g. perceptions and beliefs as well as the wider institutional environment and governance settings that shape the capacities of communities to build resilience (Ensor and Harvey, 2015; Paton, 2005; Tobin, 1999). Many conceptual and empirical studies have shown that the community level is an important scale on which to build resilience that can enhance both the individual/household and wider population level outcomes (Berkes et al., 1998; Cote and Nightingale, 2012; Nelson et al., 2007; Ross and Berkes, 2014). Yet, the community remains poorly theorized with little guidance on how to measure resilience building processes and outcomes. Both terms – resilience and community – incorporate an inherent vagueness combined with a positive linguistic bias and are used with increasing frequency both on their own as well as in combination (Patel et al., 2017; Mulligan et al., 2016; Brand and Jax, 2007; Strunz, 2012; Fekete et al., 2014). Both terms raise, as Norris et al. (2008) put it, the same concerns with variations in meaning. In resilience research we can detect a disparity whereby the focus of research has often lain at either the larger geographical scales (e.g. regions) or, as in psychological research, at the level of the individual, extending to households (Ross and Berkes, 2014; Paton, 2005). Across these scales and sites of interest, resilience is consistently understood as relational. It is an ever-emergent property of social–ecological and technological systems co-produced with individuals and their imaginations. As a relational feature, resilience is both held in and produced through social interactions. Arguably, the most intense interactions that are of direct relevance to those at risk are at the local level, including the influence of non-local actors and institutions. It is in this space that the community becomes integral to resilience and a crucial level of analysis for resilience research (Cutter et al., 2008; Walker and Westley, 2011; Schneiderbauer and Ehrlich, 2006). The idea of community comprises groups of actors (e.g. individuals, organizations, businesses) which share a common identity or interest. Communities can have a spatial expression with geographic boundaries and a common identity or shared fate (Norris et al., 2008:128). Following the approach of Mulligan et al. (2016) we propose to apply a dynamic and multi-layered understanding of community, including community as a place-based concept (e.g. inhabitants of a flooded neighbourhood), as a virtual and communicative community within a spatially extended network (e.g. members of crisis management in a region) and/or as an imagined community of individuals who may never have contact with each other but who share an identity or interest.