Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

94 discourses on disaster risk reduction, e.g. in the UK National Community Resilience Programme (National Acadamies, 2012) or on the level of local authorities in the UK (Jacobs and Malpas, 2017; Shaw, 2012). However, simply transplanting a descriptive concept established in ecology to a normative idea of how societies should be governed through resilience is not necessarily a step forward since there is the risk that “the role of physical shocks” is overemphasized and the relevance of “political economic factors” undertheorized (Cote and Nightingale, 2012:478). Even if the social–ecological systems approaches take into account political or economic factors, they tend to do this with a focus on functions and structures of institutions and tend to neglect the wider “political, historical and cultural meaning.” (ibid). As an implication, as Lewis and Kelman argue (2012), attempts to make communities more resilient can actually result in a contrary situation, as they put them in a less tenable situation. This arises because resilience-based governance approaches have a tendency to be neglectful of social conflicts, inequalities and power (Fainstein, 2015:160; Jerneck and Olsson, 2008; Davoudi, 2012; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013; Olsson et al., 2014), underestimate the relevance of social institutions and political struggle (Hayward, 2013; Sjöstedt, 2015) or be unheeding of the challenges associated with the idea of community participation (Bahadur and Tanner, 2014; Bahadur et al., 2013). In addition to underestimating the relevance of socio-economic–political and interpretational aspects, resilience itself is shaping theway disaster risk reduction is organised and how responsibilities between public and private actors are distributed. In the UK, for example, resilience is part of a responsibilization agenda in which responsibility for disaster risk reduction is intentionally devolved from the national to the local level (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2011; Deeming et al., 2018a). This creates opportunities but is also contested and can provoke resistance by activists (Begg et al., 2016). Despite this increasing critical engagement with resilience, the notion is “here to stay” (Norris et al., 2008:128) for the conceivable future, not only as a theoretical concept but also as a policy tool for promoting disaster risk reduction. As such, it will have direct implications for hazard-prone communities. Based on these arguments, we identify three gaps that characterize existing resilience frameworks and are related to conceptual challenges for a comprehensive community resilience framework. First, there seems to be insufficient consideration and reflection on the role of power, governance and political interests in resilience research. Secondly, many resilience frameworks still seem to fall short of exploring how resilience is shaped by the interaction of resources, actions and learning. Due to the conceptual influence of the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) of some approaches (Chambers and Conway, 1992; Scoones, 1998; Ashley and Carney, 1999; Baumann and Sinha, 2001), resilience concepts tend to be focused on resources but fail to systematically explore the interaction of resources with actions and learning and how understanding these variables might then usefully illustrate disparities in how social equity, capacity and sustainability (i.e. key considerations of the SLF approach; see Chambers and Conway, 1992) manifest. Third, an explicit description of learning and change is largely absent in the literature that characterizes community resilience. So far, resilience as a theory of social change seems to remain rather vaguely specified (Cote and Nightingale, 2012). A resilience framework which accounts for these conceptual challenges is necessarily focused on the prospects of social reform and incorporates many “soft” elements that are notoriously difficult to measure. We thus agree with the need to operationalize resilience frameworks (Carpenter et al., 2001) but argue that existing frameworkmeasurements (e.g. Cutter et al., 2008) often fail to systematically include those challenges that we consider of critical importance for community resilience. 3. FRAMEWORK DEVELOPMENT AND METHODS USED Developing an interdisciplinary, multi-level and multi-hazard framework for characterizing and measuring the resilience of European communities calls for the application of a multifaceted approach that adopts interdisciplinary methodological processes. Therefore, we applied a complementary research strategy with the purpose of investigating resilience on different scales, from different perspectives and by applying different research methods as well as integrating the viewpoints of distinct actors. The research team came from different disciplinary backgrounds and it was the intention that no single disciplinary approach would dominate. Rather, a democratic process of consensus building was employed to arrive at methods and outputs acceptable to all. A first strand of this research strategy included intensive structured literature reviews. The first sketch of the community resilience framework was informed by the early review systematizing the different disciplinary discussions on resilience into thematic areas. As the project continued, specialized literature reviews complemented this first review by focusing on different aspects of the emerging framework and considering more recent publications. Throughout the project, developments in the literature were closely monitored and literature reviews were continuously updated (Abeling et al., 2018). A second strand involved empirical case study research in five European countries investigating community resilience related to different hazard types on different scales. The five case studies comprised multiple Alpine hazards in South Tyrol, Italy and Grisons, Switzerland; earthquakes in Turkey; river floods in central Europe; combined fluvial and pluvial floods in northern England; and heatwaves in London. A number of qualitative and quantitativemethodologies were adopted in the case study research in order to develop the final community resilience framework. The outcomes of this research have been used to inform the conceptual framework at different stages of the development process and helped to illustrate how the framework can be applied and adapted to different hazard types, scales and socio-economic and political contexts (Kuhlicke et al., 2016; Doğulu et al., 2016; Ikizer et al., 2015; Ikizer, 2014; Abeling, 2015a, b; Taylor