Abstract
Initial interest in community resilience by the U.S. federal government has been followed by waves of community resilience theory building and of community resilience assessment and intervention development and testing. This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist includes reviews of recent work to conceptualize, measure, and foster community resilience. These reviews identify common community resilience principles and considerations that cut across individual community resilience projects. These insights can inform next steps in community resilience practice and research.
We will emphasize individual and community preparedness and resilience through frequent engagement that provides clear and reliable risk and emergency information to the public . . . Our efforts to inform and empower Americans and their communities recognize that resilience has always been at the heart of the American spirit. —U.S. President Barack Obama, 2010 National Security Strategy (Obama, 2010)
Fostering community resilience is a significant goal of the U.S. States federal government. For example, community resilience is a key component of the Obama administration’s National Security Strategy (Obama, 2010). Building community resilience is one of only two goals included in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (2009) National Health Security Strategy; the U.S. Department of Homeland Security lists resilience as one of three foundational elements for homeland security (Homeland Security Advisory Council, 2011); and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (2011) National Disaster Recovery Framework includes resilience as a core principle. Thus, community resilience is an important concept in terms of improving and protecting the health and wellness of communities and currently has strong support from the U.S. federal government (as well as other governments, e.g., Australia; http://www.resilientcommunities.gov.au).
In their seminal work on community resilience, Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (2008) defined resilience as “a process linking a set of adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation after a disturbance” (p. 130). More simply, community resilience is sometimes described as a community’s ability to “bounce back” (Longstaff, Armstrong, Perrin, Parker, & Hidek, 2010) following an event and thus return to preevent levels of functioning, or perhaps even more accurately to “bounce forward” (Manyena, O’Brien, O’Keefe, & Rose, 2011) following an event, still indicating a return to preevent functioning, but as a state of communal functioning that is now adapted to the postevent reality.
For Norris et al. (2008), community resilience is related to four primary sets of networked adaptive capacities: information and communication, community competence, social capital, and economic development. Other definitions of community resilience further emphasize the collective nature of communal resilience. B. Pfefferbaum, Reissman, Pfefferbaum, Klomp, and Gurwitch (2007, p. 349) note that “community resilience is grounded in the ability of community members to take meaningful, deliberative action to remedy the effect of a problem,” R. L. Pfefferbaum and Klomp (2013, p. 279) explain that community resilience “emerges from collective activity in which individuals join together in efforts that foster response and recovery for the whole,” and Schoch-Spana (2008, p. 130) describes a “complex process of adaptation—a collective roll with the punches.” Often conceptualized in terms of disasters (Longstaff et al., 2010; Norris et al., 2008), community resilience can also apply to other events such as cyber attacks, climate change, technological evolution, unemployment, and community violence (see Houston, Spialek, Cox, Greenwood, & First, this issue, p. 270; National Research Council, 2011).
The initial wave of federal interest in community resilience and of academic efforts to define community resilience and develop community resilience theory has been followed by multiple research projects to assess and measure community resilience (e.g., Chandra et al., 2013; Leykin, Lahad, Cohen, Goldberg, & Aharonson-Daniel, 2013; Pfefferbaum, Neas, Pfefferbaum, Norris, & Van Horn, 2013; Sherrieb et al., 2012; Sherrieb, Norris, & Galea, 2010; Wyche et al., 2011) and develop community resilience intervention (B. Pfeferbaum, Pfefferbaum, Van Horn, Neas, & Houston, 2013; R. L. Pfefferbaum, Pfefferbaum, et al., 2013; Plough et al., 2013). Given the complexity of community resilience, research is this domain can be difficult and resource intensive. As such, it is important to periodically review recent work in the area in order to take stock and integrate findings to inform next steps. This is the goal of the current issue of American Behavioral Scientist.
The Community Resilience Special Issue
This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist focuses on recent advances in community resilience assessment, intervention, and theorizing. Rose Pfefferbaum et al. (this issue, p. 181) open the issue with an update of their ongoing work on the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART), by describing the results of an implementation of the CART Assessment Survey with a group of affiliated volunteer responders. The results of this implementation provide additional evidence for the utility of the CART Assessment Survey, confirm the importance of information and communication as a fifth domain in the CART community resilience model, and illustrate the importance of community engagement to perceptions of community resilience.
White et al. (this issue, p. 200) next describe the Community and Regional Resilience Institute’s (CARRI) work to develop processes, tools, and resources intended to function as community resilience interventions, thus allowing communities to assess and improve their level of resilience. The review of CARRI’s work points to several key observations about efforts to foster community resilience, including that community resilience efforts are time and relationship intensive and that committed engagement of community leadership to the community resilience process is very important. Additionally, resilience education and awareness building across a community may be needed to support resilience efforts. White et al. identify several practical strategies that may improve the success of attempts to foster community resilience, including conceptualizing community resilience as more than the purview of emergency management, using flexible and collaborative resilience assessment tools, and considering the use of a community resilience certificate program.
Cox and Hamlen (this issue, p. 220) next describe their work to implement the Rural Resilience Index, a disaster resilience assessment and planning tool for use in rural communities. Working in rural communities in British Columbia, Canada, the results of these efforts indicate that the Rural Resilience Index is a flexible tool that can be adapted by individual communities to promote grassroots community resilience efforts that are integrated with other related activities. Cox and Hamlen also identify several resilience considerations that are specific to rural and remote community settings.
Betty Pfefferbaum et al. (this issue, p. 238) next present a systematic review of existing community resilience interventions, focusing on key principles of community resilience intervention including the use of a multihazard approach, incorporation of community assessment, attention to community engagement, adherence to bioethical principles, emphasis on assets and needs, and a promotion of skill development. This review indicates that multiple community resilience intervention options are available to practitioners and researchers. The review also provides a foundational overview that can inform efforts to synthesize community resilience intervention elements or to identify alternative community resilience intervention approaches.
Aldrich and Meyer (this issue, p. 254) next focus the current special issue on advancing theoretical explorations of community resilience with their review of the import of social capital and networks to community resilience. This article provides a rich exploration of social capital as understood through the lens of community resilience, which in turn allows for the identification of practical recommendations for those working to foster community resilience. These recommendations include using time banks and community currency, remembering the importance of citizen interaction and social events, and understanding the contributions of the physical or architectural environment in fostering community resilience.
Finally, Houston et al. (this issue, p. 270) close the issue with an examination of the centrality of communication and media to community resilience. Employing the perspectives of communication ecology, strategic communication, and public relations, Houston et al. propose a revised community resilience model that includes four components: communication systems and resources, community relationships, strategic communication processes, and community attributes. With this revised model, scholars and practitioners can better identify the elements of community resilience that involve community connections, processes, systems, or attributes, which in turn allows for a more flexible functional understanding of community resilience.
Each of the articles in this special issue provide overviews of recent work that can inform next steps to increase the feasibility and utility of community resilience research and practice, thus improving the capacity for communities to respond to and cope with disasters and other acute and ongoing crises.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declare that there is no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (5U79SM061264- 01) through the Terrorism and Disaster Center at the University of Missouri.
Author Biography
) at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on communication at all phases of disasters and on the mental health effects and sociopolitical consequences of community crises.