Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

93 Considering the conceptual vagueness and variations of community and resilience, only a few approaches have tried to characterize and measure community resilience comprehensively (Cutter et al., 2014; Sherrieb et al., 2010; Mulligan et al., 2016). Thus, the aim of this paper is to further fill this gap and elaborate a coherent conceptual framework for the characterization and evaluation of community resilience to natural hazards by building both on a top-down systems understanding of resilience and on an empirical, bottom-up perspective specifically including the subjective variables and how they link to broader governance settings. The framework has been developed within the European research project emBRACE in an iterative process building on existing scholarly debates and on empirical case study research in five countries (Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey) using participatory consultation with community stakeholders, where the framework was applied and ground-tested in different regional and cultural contexts and for different hazard types. Further the framework served as a basis for guiding the assessment of community resilience on the ground. The paper is structured as follows: the next section provides an overview of key themes and characteristics of conceptual frameworks on community resilience and identifies gaps and open questions in the current conceptual framings in the context of natural hazards. In Sect. 3 we present the methodology for the development of the emBRACE framework of community resilience. In Sect. 4 the emBRACE framework is introduced along its central elements and characteristics and illustrated by examples from the case study research. Section 5 discusses the interlinkages between the framework elements as well as the application and operationalization of the framework and reflects on the results, methodology and further research. 2. CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS OF COMMUNITY RESILIENCE IN DISASTER RESEARCH AND POLICY Both the concept of community and resilience are contested and this in different fields of research and policy. This chapter therefore does not aim at providing a comprehensive overview of different strands of research (for more details see Abeling et al., 2018); the ambition is rather to present a heuristic framework for understanding, explaining and assessing community resilience to natural hazards. Therefore, we present here central strands of research that influenced the development of the emBRACE framework of community resilience. Alexander’s etymological resilience journey (2013) shows that the word looks back on a “long history of multiple, interconnected meanings in art, literature, law, science and engineering. Some of the uses invoked a positive outcome or state of being, while others invoked a negative one. In synthesis, before the 20th century, the core meaning was `to bounce back”’ (ibid., 2710). However, since Holling’s influential publication (1973) on “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems” the idea of restricting resilience above all to the ability of ecosystems to bounce back to a pre-disturbance state and, by implication, assume a more or less stable environment, came under increasing pressure. Therefore, another of the tensions surrounding the concept of resilience in the context of disaster risk reduction concerns its relation to social change and transformation. A divide is emerging between those that propose resilience as an opportunity for social reform and transformation in the context of uncertainty (Bahadur and Tanner, 2014; Brown, 2014; Olsson et al., 2014; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013; Sudmeier-Rieux, 2014; Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2015; Kelman et al., 2016), and those that argue for a restriction of the term to functional resistance and stability (Smith and Stirling, 2010; Klein et al., 2003). Limiting resilience to narrow interpretations of robust infrastructure would promote local disaster risk reduction that fails to address the need for social change and learning. Frameworks of disaster resilience need to account for multiple entwined pressures, (e.g. development processes, DRR and climate change; see Kelman et al., 2015) to learn and adapt and to innovate existing risk management regimes on the community level. At the heart of this divide is the gradual translation of resilience from its firm base in the natural sciences to the social sciences, which brings with it a set of inherent ontological and epistemological challenges that become particularly prominent in discussions of community resilience. Rooted in ecology, resilience through the lens of Holling (1973, 1996) emphasized the concept of (multiple) equilibriums of systems in the face of “disturbances”. This focus on returning to or progressing towards stability domains laid the foundation for the “bouncing back” narrative that continues to shape resilience policy and discourses, particularly in the area of disaster risk management and emergency planning. When discussing resilience in the context of community, however, a range of questions arise that shed light on the difficulties of translating ideas from the natural to the social sciences. These concern, amongst others, the character of disturbances in social systems (e.g. who gets disturbed by what or by whom?), the intentionality of human action (e.g. what role for purposeful interventions?), the overarching goals of resilience (e.g. what is desirable?), challenges with system boundaries (e.g. who is part of a social system?) and the role of power (e.g. who is empowered to act, participate, transform). Besides the differences in scope of the definition between bouncing back and societal change, there is another tension about whether resilience is a normative, an analytical or a more descriptive concept (Fekete et al., 2014; Mulligan et al., 2016). While, early on, resilience was employed as a descriptive concept in ecology that attempted to integrate different notions of stability (i.e. withstanding, recovering and persisting), its thematic expansion to the analysis of socio-ecological systems goes hand in handwith a strong normative orientation or even prescriptive elements of how resilience ought to be organized (Brand and Jax, 2007), which is also increasingly applied as a policy goal to promote disaster risk reduction at all scales (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015, 2007). The notion of resilience is meanwhile an integral element at the international policy level to both the Hyogo Framework for Action and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015, 2007) as well as to national and local