Resilient Communities in Disasters and Emergencies: Exploring their Characteristics ^†

Abstract

This paper discusses the capacity of communities to be resilient in the face of disasters. This is the question of what allows communities to rebuild after a major destructive event and preferably to “build back better.” The paper lists six qualities of resilient communities drawn from the literature researching these events: organizations are flexible; they have strong leadership; there is strong community learning; they are effective at collective problem solving and cooperation; social capital and civil society are strong; and communities effectively engage with helping institutions beyond their boundaries. The paper relates each quality to social capital, to the ways the three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking—are interconnected, and to preparatory methods that might be used to strengthen social capital so that communities may be more resilient.

1. Introduction

This paper discusses how communities may respond to disasters and emergencies in more or less effective ways 1. There is an extensive literature on disaster preparedness and response, much of it concerned with physical structures, policy interventions, and effective ways NGOs may intervene. This literature compares disasters around the world, so it is not focused on any particular nation, and it compares crises of many different kinds so the units of analysis vary. The points of comparison involve abstract concepts like ecology or geographic vulnerability within which specific events like floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, or even wartime attacks are compared. This paper focuses on one of those categories, how communities respond and, in particular, on the concept of community resilience.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines resilience as follows:

The ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its basic structures and functions.

[1]

While this definition frames resilience in a helpful way, it also suggests a “before and after” comparison. Much policy thinking that uses this framework has asked what characteristics of a place predispose it to destruction when disasters strike and what it takes to return that place to normality. This approach tends not to take into account social, economic, and geographic inequalities that might predispose a place to destruction and it tends to overlook inequalities that might be recreated after disaster recovery is achieved [2]. Recent thinking moved beyond this thinking, focusing instead on processes that allow a community to “build back better”. The contemporary desire is for more effective systems, designs, relationships, and processes to be put in place that both protect the place from later destructive events and correct earlier inequalities that placed vulnerable populations at special risk [3].

The community focus within this new perspective has to do with the dynamism exhibited as they rebuild. This dynamism has to do with the way local collectivities identify problems, undertake action, find effective leadership, locate assets and mobilize resources that often are in kind rather than monetary. Whether communities can respond in a resilient way does not have to do with specific, fixed attributes that are required for resilience to be achieved. Rather, resilience is a variable that grows out of the context that includes the history of previous responses, local culture and social networks, and the larger political and economic systems in which a community is embedded. Similar “objective” attributes may play out very differently from one place to another.

Reviews of research on community resilience consistently report that the presence of “social capital” is a key factor in predicting community resilience [3,4]. Mayer [1] finds that use of the concept suffers because authors have shifting definitions of the term and different ways of operationalizing measures in order to demonstrate that it exists and how it is different from one place to another. Mayer finds that in most research “bonding” social capital is emphasized, where authors focus on local networks of emotional and social support. He struggles to find useful policy recommendations about how communities may build social capital.

Such recommendations are difficult to develop, as Aldrich [4] argues in his review of the relationship between social capital and resilience, because these studies are overly narrow in the framework they use for understanding social capital. Focusing only on bonds within a community ignores the reality that communities are embedded in larger social and political contexts. Putnam [5] captures this when he relates bonding social capital to bridging social capital—extensions on the horizontal dimension to relationships people have with actors in other separate, and sometimes antagonistic, communities that can work together to be mutually supportive. Putnam also talks about the importance of linking social capital—relationships with individuals and institutions that are vertically situated, operating at a higher level of aggregation from the local community [6].

2. Materials and Methods

This paper builds on Aldrich’s [4] (p. 243) research review that includes comparative case studies of four large-scale disasters. After discussing the cases in detail, he argues that most policy-driven efforts to prevent and mitigate disaster fail because they are centralized, often government-driven, top-down efforts to implement change that have the tendency to destroy social capital. This raises the question of what could be done to build and preserve social capital in a way that fosters community integration while also drawing in and making effective use of connections and resources drawn from outside. That is the issue explored in this paper.

This analysis is primarily theoretical in the sense that we rely heavily on the research literature having to do with disasters. The paper also, however, uses the method of “slow sociology” [7]. The author has undertaken community research in his local community over a period of decades. Some of this research has focused on disasters. But most of the research has involved non-disaster projects that have involved expressions of social capital in different ways. He has developed a deep, ethnographic knowledge of the local area and draws on this knowledge and background to present specific concepts related to social capital in local communities throughout the rural area in which he lives and works. This slow sociology differs from other ethnographic community studies that are carried out over a relatively short period of time—usually a year or two—and that have a specific analytic focus. While this shorter-term research can be effective at identifying variables and causal relationships, it is not as focused on the broader social organization of the community as is the case in slow sociological research. Slow sociology draws on this broader social organization to bring the multi-level operation of social capital into view [8].

A major contention of this paper is that social capital develops slowly over time and it does so simultaneously on a number of dimensions. While communities may be resilient because they possess rich social capital, we do not primarily learn about what might build social capital by studying the events related to disasters. Past relationships, past projects, and networks that have been built up within, between, and above communities over time are the stuff of social capital. Communities are embedded in social fields: larger metropolitan areas, larger political structures, and regional economic systems. We need slow sociology to bring the field, the holistic context, into view [9].

We draw on Putnam’s [5] framework that identifies three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking. Keeping the three types in view is important because it expands from the realm of tightly integrated, bounded communities horizontally into adjacent communities and vertically into the political and economic institutional structure. We treat social capital and resilience as processes that must be dynamically developed at each level of analysis, but where the different types overlap and interpenetrate. This makes its operationalization challenging to study as Graveline and Germain [3] tell us:

To date, there is no unified approach to resilience, no single way to define it, measure it, or promote it to our communities...which poses a challenge to its practical application. Because resilience is a complex, multi-dimensional and multi-scalar term, it brings several complications to its application. Its use implies a sharing of challenges and responsibilities between scales of intervention and practice and thus requires a multi-sectorial, multi-scalar, and inter-scalar approach.

No single, definitive recommendations can be made about policies that will increase social capital and resilience. We can, however, offer concepts specific to each type of social capital and experience tells us that they can together enhance social capital in a community.

The paper begins with a short presentation of qualities that characterize resilient communities. This is followed by a discussion of social capital that presents the history of the concept, definitions of the three types of social capital, and a presentation of what it means for social capital to be a process with the three types interlinked. After this, we will return to a discussion of qualities of resilience and how they relate to elements of social capital. This section of the paper draws on community studies that focus on the processes and elements of social capital. We will synthesize findings from these studies to make statements about how resilience is related to social capital.

3. Resilience

Reviews by Mayer [1] and by Graveline and Germain [3] both give summaries from the literature of attributes shown by resilient communities. They include things like recovery of population lost because of the disaster, physical reconstruction of the material community space, economic recovery of the region, or creation of formal governmental arrangements to deal with future disasters. This paper is concerned with a different strand of research that they review, community resilience. While community resilience is generally included in the elements of resilience, researchers in the literature tend to treat it in a general way that neither Mayer [1] nor Graveline and Germain [3] find useful. Usually, studies mention the importance of social capital in a general way, emphasizing the importance of dense local social networks and emotional support, but they do not talk about the larger context that supports and nurtures community social capital.

Aldrich [4], in contrast, provides a thoughtful, social-science based summary of attributes of resilient communities and we anchor our discussion on his work. We also build on what Mayer [1] (p. 171) calls “the function of social capital” and “the potential mechanisms linking social capital to resilience…” We give a list here of qualities of resilient communities without much elaboration. Our plan is to later discuss the types of social capital and the interrelationship of the types as a way of expanding the discussion of what makes communities resilient. We also bring in analysis from the literature of community studies and from our own slow sociology research to suggest specific steps that might be taken to enhance community resilience.

3.1. Characteristics of Resilient Communities

This section of the paper identifies six characteristics that contribute to what has been termed “community resilience”, that is, the capacity of a local community to engage with crisis planning, crisis response, and recovery efforts afterwards. Lacking these attributes is a reason other communities fail to develop resilience.

• Organizational flexibility. Responding to unexpected events, local social, economic, and governmental organizations innovate and repurpose their activities and resources so that they address community needs in new and unexpected ways;
• Leadership. Individuals step forward to define community problems that must be addressed. They are respected by community members so their advice is accepted and they are skilled at supporting subgroups as they emerge;
• Community Learning and Collective problem solving. Resilience involves bottom-up organizing, social learning, and a capacity of residents to recognize social assets and to take action to put them to use. Some communities have experienced similar disasters in the past and from this experience they have learned new and better ways to respond;
• Cooperation and collaboration. Strong local social networks where people trust each other and give each other emotional support are important. It also is important for local people to have ties to people outside of their locality, to leaders of nearby communities where they have established arrangements for working together. They also need network ties to people situated in vertical networks, working in organizations that serve larger units of population aggregation;
• Social capital. This generally refers to dense social networks wherein participants have reciprocal relationships of exchange that over time allow them to build up mutual trust and relationships they can use to accomplish personal and social goals. We treat this as a quality of the whole social and political field in which the community exists. Each of the elements of resilient communities listed here grows out of processes that build social capital and they rely on the elements of social capital—bonding social capital, bridging social capital, and linking social capital—being interconnected and supporting each other;
• Engagement with institutions situated beyond the community. Most disasters require more resources than are available locally, so help from government or large NGOs is necessary. Large outside organizations tend to be blind to local culture and local people tend to not know how to interact well with large outside organizations. In resilient communities, the two sides interact well.

3.2. Social Capital

Social capital is a concept that has been widely used and developed in a number of ways over the last quarter century, so providing a succinct “definition” in a short paper is not possible.

Aldrich [4] provides a good analysis that is meant to develop and clarify how the concept is related to community resilience. Many discussions of social capital in the resilience literature emphasize tight local social networks and mutually supportive relationships that give people emotional support. This relates to the tendency among resilience researchers to treat social capital primarily as bonding social capital, or the sort of tight social networks and culture of mutual support that exist in some rural towns and urban ethnic enclaves [1].

The problem with this approach is that communities with strong, bonding social capital may be internally isolated and hostile to other communities—what Graveline and Germaine [3] call “the dark side of social capital”. Cattell [10] explains, in her comparison of three London communities in terms of their capacity to develop and use social capital to achieve change, that in order for communities to define and effectively respond to social problems, community members must have relationships with outside communities and be flexible in accepting outside influences. Local communities exist in a larger context and members generally participate individually in activities throughout the larger region, even in the small rural towns discussed by Wilkinson [11].

In resilient communities, some members have built up strong relationships over time with people in adjacent communities, what is called by Putnam [5] “bridging” social capital. Some communities exist in settings where there is conflict and hostility between communities, as in the Northern Irish communities studied by Bacon [12], where mutually constructive work is only possible if, over time, some members have developed cooperative relationships across boundaries. In other less stressful settings, organizations like volunteer fire companies, that develop in strongly bonded communities, routinely interact with companies from other jurisdictions to respond to fires and disasters, so their cross-community relationships are well developed.

Strong “linking social capital”, made up of what Warren [6] calls “vertical” relationships, also are critical for community resilience. Skocpol [13] and Hunter [14] talk about how important these connections are for creating connections that pass information up and down levels of aggregation and for providing channels for downward assistance with policy issues. As Shaw and Koda [15] tell us with respect to an earthquake in Kobe, Japan, linking social capital must be a two-directional relationship. That is, local people must have relationships and be confident in speaking and proposing ideas to people at higher levels of aggregation. Meanwhile, people at higher levels must reach out and make connections with people at lower levels, making special efforts to learn about and understand local cultures and networks while also seeking out and rewarding ideas offered from that lower level.

It is important to appreciate the difference between communities strong in social capital and those weak in social capital. One of the best examples is Klinenberg’s [16] comparison of the fate of two adjacent communities, North and South Lawndale, during an extreme heat wave in Chicago where a large number of elderly people died. North Lawndale was historically an industrial area with a predominantly African American community. Most of the industry had moved out, local shops had closed down, and a population of elderly people were left, isolated, with little support from voluntary associations, living in multi-story, walk-up tenements. There was little street traffic and few activities that would take elderly people out of their apartments. Isolated in overheated buildings, many people died of heat stroke.

South Lawndale was a vibrant, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood about eight blocks south of North Lawndale. The neighborhood had a variety of small shops and many local civic organizations and churches that ran clubs for the residents. There was a lot of street traffic on the main boulevard and residents in local apartment buildings came out to use the small grocery stores or the small restaurants that populated the main street. While the neighborhood was predominantly Hispanic, there were many elderly African Americans living in apartment buildings in the area and they routinely used the local stores. When the heat wave hit, if these people did not show up at their usual coffee shop or grocery stores, they were missed, and local residents were inclined to go out to find them to see if they were OK. Few elderly people in this neighborhood died because they were protected by the strong social capital in the area just as people in the adjacent neighborhood died from the lack of social capital.

South Lawndale is a good example of a community with strong bonding social capital and we can see how people work together in such a place. Klinenberg’s [16] account implies that the social capital we see is just there, automatically, as a by-product of social solidarity. Accounts of other communities show us, however, that the social capital that might foster effective community resilience can erode and must be built and rebuilt to be effective. Salamon’s [17] (pp. 18–20) account of Illinois rural towns relates how qualities of suburbanization were developing because the number of people who commuted to Chicago had increased. Salamon provides a detailed account of social capital as a process. She tells us how people worked to build social capital or in some cases how neglect, ignoring local history, and showing littler interest in building relationships in town caused social capital to decline.

In accounts that examine social capital as a process, we learn about communities that are embedded in larger geographic and governmental contexts. We see that over time, local people and government officials work together in a way that allows local interests to be explained and represented to people working at higher social levels. Governmental and large organization officials come to understand how to discover and address local needs in ways that complement local social structures and practices. These relationships are historical in the sense that, as they work together, people are reminded of past activities and projects and learn how past efforts and relationships can be used to address current situations [18,19]. These relationships also make up a network that moves up and down levels of aggregation and that cuts across institutions and zones of action. Or as Graveline and Germaine [3] say, the networks are “multi-sectorial, multi-scalar, and inter-scalar.”

4. Managing the Development of Social Capital to Enhance Resilience

As research reviews that explore the relationships between social capital and resilience, both Mayer [1] and Graveline and Germaine [3] talk about the difficulty researchers have had identifying attributes that make communities creative, flexible, and resourceful in responding to disasters. These are qualities that allow for resilience, but there are no cookbook interventions that could be implemented so communities can develop these qualities, which all are by-products of effective social capital.

What we can do, and what we attempt in this section, is talk about practices and methods that help build up the three types of social capital—bonding, bridging, and linking social capital. In each case, we argue that building social capital needs to be an intentional process and that there are specific “moves” that can help it build. But we do not want to treat any one type of social capital as a separate “platform” or structure that exists and operates on its own. The three types of social capital interact so that development on one level happens in part because there is self-conscious intervention from actors on other levels as they build their own network linkages. This happens as they address community problems by capitalizing upon the horizontal or vertical networks that operate in their context and that allow them to connect up and down levels of aggregation or left or right in a horizontal stratum. This image of how social capital networks interact is fundamental to Aldrich’s [4] theory of how the context of social capital functioning allows communities to be resilient. In this section of the paper, we will discuss how each of the elements of resilience listed earlier relates to dynamics of social capital.

4.1. Organizational Flexibility

Organizational flexibility refers to the willingness of organizations to repurpose programs and resources to meet the needs of a community and unforeseen challenges and needs. One of the hallmarks of resilient communities is for members to respond creatively to new challenges and to learn from past experiences that were similar and may have arisen before the disaster occurred. Having had to adapt to challenges in the past, having formed relationships with other organizations, and having previously involved active community people in past activities, organization members are likely to recognize that they can meet new challenges and carry out new tasks that are outside of their normal work activities. Organizations also may recognize that their operation is not using some resources that could be made available to others or could be used to solve a problem if they are willing to let loose from feelings of possessiveness or relax regulations that would have blocked this new innovative use during routine times.

Flexibility is easier to achieve if organization leaders and community activists have been in the habit of meeting regularly to talk about issues in the community and challenges that face specific organizations. The Bloomsburg, PA river flood [20] provides a good example. A diverse collection of human service organizations had been meeting monthly for several years and in meetings group members discussed approaches to homelessness and had discussed new programs and challenges being undertaken by group members. Members of the coalition came to know each other well, learned about qualities, programs, and capabilities of the different organizations, and had cooperated in groups of two to five on projects, so they were used to working together. When the flood occurred, some organizations, like the food distribution center, were able to quickly make needed resources available even though recipients were not their usual “food distressed” clients. One of the most dramatic examples of creativity came when the shelter for battered women went under water. Residents were terrified that their violent former partners would find them and brutalize them. The local college opened their dormitories to shelter residents and staff, thus creating a special purpose shelter that was opened on higher ground.

The regular coalition meetings provide a combination of bonding and bridging social capital. Bloomsburg itself is a small city in a region of small towns. To the extent coalition members lived and worked in Bloomsburg, they regularly interacted around the community and provided mutual assistance as agency personnel. Living in a small area with a stable population, they were neighbors, often having grown up in the town, so they may have gone to primary school with other coalition members, they might share relatives, send their children to school together, participate as coaches and leaders in youth sports, and attend church together or participate in inter-church projects. Coalition members were part of a dense network of overlapping ties representing bonding social capital. Since some coalition members came from agencies located in nearby towns, relationships developed with these individuals meant coalition members could search out resources or find individuals who could provide help in these other towns, representing bridging social capital.

Resilience is encouraged when regular, cooperative networks are created, so that community members and agency personnel get to know each other, work together on projects, and understand each others agencies. Setting up these coalitions requires intentional efforts, often by coordinating bodies (in Bloomsburg, the United Way started the coalition). While this might be a U.S. example (the United Way being a U.S. organization), similar coordinating bodies are set up in other countries as well and serve the similar function of providing local residents with established relationships and practice at engaging in the kinds of civic activities that will be needed when disaster strikes or shared community projects are needed [21].

Cunningham [18] gives an example from Ethiopia, and we learn that cooperative community funding organizations are set up in many communities to fund funerals and to allow women to cooperate on projects which form the basis of other community cooperative projects (equb and idir). For these projects to succeed, local people must be part of a culture that supports and uses cooperative civic projects. People gain experience at running these organizations and residents are predisposed to join community groups and put effort into undertaking projects to address new needs and challenges [22].

4.2. Leadership

Resilient communities have a stock of effective leaders who take initiatives to identify and address community problems, who have legitimacy with the community, who are expected to act on behalf of the community, and where the community grows and supports leaders. The perspective we offer is different from the approach used in much of the leadership literature, where the focus is on individuals who lead and the role of leaders in organizations [23]. Communities become resilient when there is a stock of effective leaders and they emerge from routine community life in times of need. The community generates leaders when it has effective networks and a sense of history, so members know where to look for leaders when emergencies demand them. This perspective follows Pigg [24] (p. 196), who says, “This perspective looks at leadership as an emergent property arising from specific kinds of relationships among community actors. A commensurate view of community is the interactional perspective of ‘field theory’”. A good review of the field theory perspective is provided by Lamm et al. [25].

In a community that has a history of active associations and community action [26], and well developed bonding social capital, people are likely to remember past action incidents, how the community addressed problems at that time, how solutions were developed, and which individuals took the lead. Communities may sometimes need to be guided by organizers, a role Cunningham [18] played as he describes his use of the Assets Based Community Development (ABCD) method in his Ethiopia work. Effective action comes as community members are led to recall past community actions that were similar to a challenge that lays in front of them. Members are encouraged to remember what they did as a collective, how they found in-kind resources and assets, and they are encouraged to think in creative terms about how they can replicate and repeat their past effort to address crises. Those who led during the previous action tend to be respected and encouraged to step forward in the current situation. Their leadership is integrated into the local culture and whether these individuals want to lead in the current situation, they are likely to be pulled forward by the group and pushed into taking roles as public spokespeople and as strategic planners [27].

While leadership is emergent—arising out of the primordial ooze of community social life—it also is important for there to be leaders who lead. As Wheeldon [28] describes, effective community leaders are immersed in the bonding social capital system. They know individuals, the stage and situation in life of potential volunteers, the ecology of small, informal groups in the community, and what inducements would work to draw individuals in, to take on projects and to take charge of a small group they have been part of. Leaders also are “moral entrepreneurs” [29], in the sense that they recognize problematic situations that trouble and challenge community members. They pull residents together into activist movements and they effectively articulate both the nature of the problem and what actions might be taken. Often these people make “social problem development” a quasi-professional role [30]. When a community movement develops and those with resources (government offices, foundations, businesses) are ready to support work to address the problem, the moral entrepreneur is likely to be the person hired. Since these people try to make a living with this work, it is important for governmental officials and agency officers to channel resources towards them to keep them from “starving” (not having enough work to remain in the role). This is a way that a community and its leaders can self-consciously develop a stock of leaders who will step forward in an entrepreneurial fashion to creatively build action coalitions and to serve as the public face of an initiative when it is needed. Without these activists, the community cannot act and cannot be resilient.

4.3. Community Learning and Collective Problem Solving

Resilience refers to the general capacity of communities to “bounce back” after a disaster, so their physical, institutional, and social structure can provide for residents’ needs in a way similar to the capacity that existed before the event. While some communities are well equipped and effectively rebuild their physical, institutional, and social structure, other communities fare poorly. The location of some communities means they are prone to facing destructive events like floods, earthquakes, and destructive storms. Resilience scholars ask what communities “learn” from these earlier events that allows them to prepare and respond to repeated events more effectively. This is not just a matter of learning, for example, how to construct buildings so they will not so readily collapse in an earthquake. Social resilience refers more to a self-governance process that allows communities to undertake bottom-up planning and organizing. Emerging from the grassroots, people solve problems on their own in a way that, presumably, is better fit to local needs, to the local culture, and also can be mobilized more rapidly than might be the case for government-inspired and sponsored renewal efforts.

Many studies in the disaster literature tell us that despite the work of large government and NGO efforts to assist and rebuild communities, they often poorly understand the local history and organization of spontaneous volunteering, which may be effective at recruiting informal helpers and targeting needs that local people understand but that outsiders might not see [31,32]. Indeed, Harris et al. [33] describe this as the “inclusion/exclusion paradox”. Local people may not understand the risks and dangers of amateur volunteering and as a consequence they may be excluded from helping by professional organizations. While this exclusion may be safer and more efficient, the professional organizations usually lack knowledge of local dynamics or do not include local people in project planning and implementation. This is the case despite the greater understanding local people have of how the community might effectively help itself [32,34,35].

One aspect of local empowerment is the kind of community learning that may happen if crisis events of roughly the same kind repeat. The first time a disaster occurs, damage and personal injury may be great because people do not know what to do to preserve life and protect property. Observing the disaster process and learning what parts of the community are most vulnerable allows leaders to recommend protective steps that could be taken in the future. Members and leaders then know to tell people to move quickly and to direct them to move to safe locations. The knowledge people build up is contextual and experiential and often idiosyncratic to the place and, thus, it is different from standardized technical knowledge. Much of their ability to develop community resilience has to do with whether they trust the experiential knowledge their leaders have developed and whether, as a consequence, they can resist efforts by professionals to impose their techniques in ways that discount local knowledge [36].

This learning is related to an array of types of knowledge that community people must master. Some of this knowledge is technical and may be too difficult for local people to understand, especially in areas of socio-economic inequality and limited educational achievement. But development efforts in less wealthy countries teach us that residents with little education can master complex processes, and that self-help is an important part of recovery work [37]. The more important issue is whether residents trust the knowledge to be effective and whether local people can effectively teach skills, techniques, and methods to their peers. If bonding social capital is weak, people may not trust leaders and seemingly knowledgeable people enough to devote personal resources and time to learning. Problems also arise if outside assistance organizations design interventions that meet advanced technical standards, but that local people do not trust or that involve hidden long-term costs that are unappealing investments to people living with very restricted monetary resources [38,39].

Local action may be difficult to launch the first time a disaster strikes because communities are fragmented, lacking bonding social capital. As people experience events, they learn where resources are located, what individuals within their communities and in government and outside organizations are helpful. The process of working together also creates relationships that become strong and trusting as people work together—disasters build community. Thus, one aspect of learning how to operate during a disaster is that social capital and networks are built up, strengthened, and perhaps institutionalized so the channels of reaching out remain in place and can be effectively used [40].

Political learning is part of community learning, but it also is part of empowerment. Through their disaster experience, people master methods for relating to the political system and to large, external organizations. One aspect of community response is exploring the kinds of political actions that work, how outside authorities will undercut or ignore local efforts to affect the political system, and what kinds of direct-action steps attack political resistance from higher level authorities [27].

4.4. Cooperation and Collaboration

Resilient communities identify challenges and residents work together to generate creative solutions to problems that are new and challenging. Fragmented communities fail in part because the challenges seem insurmountable and community members quit without working on the project. If people do not start on a project, it does not get completed. If people do not put together a team or an organization, then there can be no organizational development. At the starting stage, many efforts to organize a group seem too small-scale, too idealistic, and too unlikely to succeed, so it is easy to step away and not start the cooperative effort. Discouragement kills projects. Members of some communities share a feeling that their neighborhood is run down and unattractive, with citizens who waste their lives on unproductive activities. A negative neighborhood self-image kills projects. Conversely, when communities develop and adopt a positive self-image, they are inclined to take on projects that seem patently hopeless, and some of these projects succeed. More importantly, after community members have several successes, they are more ready to take on new challenging efforts [41].

An important aspect of communities being able to take on and succeed at new projects is for leaders and members to know what community assets exist and to know how to access and mobilize them. We may expect that in communities with strong bonding social capital, relationships will be so strong, frequent, and interdependent that the presence and location of community assets will be known. Kretzmann and McKnight [42] assure us this is not true, as they articulate their Assets Based Community Development (ABCD) system. Community members all have past histories and often they do not present their accomplishments as part of their current self presentation. Retired people may have had careers as skilled craftspeople. Other people will have had leadership experiences, periods of skill development and use, and successes at carrying out projects that are only known if local leaders and activists make a self-conscious effort to identify those capacities and bring them to the surface in the current setting. Kretzmann and McKnight [42] have a detailed questionnaire that they recommend administering to local residents in order to build up a local skills bank and services exchange system so that the community is practiced at eliciting in-kind resources to take on necessary projects and tasks.

Applying the ABCD methodology in Ethiopia, Cunningham [18] leads community memory meetings so residents can recall collective projects that were successful in the past and that could be used as templates for undertaking current challenging projects. Many successful projects in the village he worked with were forgotten. The memory meetings reminded people of how to do things and gave them confidence that they could take on new projects. Community members also related how successfully carrying out projects in previous years had important emotional side effects, like giving up alcoholism. The focus on successfully tackling projects with minimal resources had convinced people that they had to be more careful about family resources and they recognized that buying alcohol was taking money that they wanted to put towards building up family and personal projects.

Cross-community, cooperative relationships developed over time are important for enduring bridging social capital. Bacon [12] documents this process in his study of how cross-community peace-oriented projects and groups were developed in Northern Ireland during the time of the Troubles. Protestant and Catholic communities often were physically bounded with strong internal bonding social capital. Cross-community interaction was often dangerous. However, certain groups and some leaders were able to form relationships across boundaries because they shared specific interests. With these relationships, these people developed social and emotional skills that were needed to interact successfully across boundaries—Protestant mural painters knew Catholic mural painters; Protestant disabled people knew Catholic disabled people; Protestant soccer players knew Catholic soccer players. Once they had relationships and skills, they were able to set up cooperative, peace-building organizations—the women’s movement, for example, was instrumental in creating the framework for the Good Friday Agreement because activist women did not let sectarian affiliation block their relationships. Strong bridging social capital was essential to the peace process.

Bridging social capital does not require physically separate, hostile communities. People working in physically separate communities and in separate human services institutions (health care versus education versus housing versus criminal justice, for example) usually do not get to know each other. Occasionally, people do get involved in projects across community and institutional boundaries and the contacts they make become network ties they can put to use later to address new but similar problems. “Chaining” refers to the way new projects are built based on learnings from previous projects and network connections developed earlier [19]. As more chaining happens, cross-community network ties become stronger and the overall net—the field—becomes more tightly integrated. People also get more adept at using resources in new and unexpected ways and applying methods of work developed in an earlier partnership to deal with the new challenges that arise in emergency situations.

Cooperation and collaboration become strong if community members develop a history of self-consciously locating in-kind resources and using them to solve community problems. In resilient communities, there tends to be a history of people seeking out and using resources as well as developing network relationships that can be put to use in new creative ways. Barton [43] tells us that cooperation and collaboration are effective in times of disaster if these kinds of relationships are developed in routine organizational activities in non-disaster times. This is why, in his view, the most effective disaster response organizations are volunteer fire companies and the Salvation Army [44,45], since both organizations deal with emergencies on a regular basis. Communities where chaining and cooperative relationships are recognized, valued, and used are most likely to be equipped to respond effectively when disaster strikes.

4.5. Social Capital Development

While we have talked about the ways specific types of social capital—bonding and bridging—may be developed, Aldrich [4] is emphatic, saying that in resilient communities, there is a holistic response that ties together local bonded communities, horizontal networks with strong bridging, and vertical connections to larger geographic areas and more aggregate levels of government.

When people talk about social capital or make policy recommendations to encourage community resilience, their suggestions tend to be specific and focused on particular areas of community structure or policy practice. Doing this is like focusing on the trees in a forest rather than on the whole forest. The forest is the main emphasis of field theory, which aims to focus on the whole, rather than on particular elements [9]. When we say resilient communities are strong in social capital, we mean this in a holistic, not a fragmented way.

The “whole” in the discussion of resilient communities is what we call “civil society”. Civil society is one of those terms used often in many different ways by different scholars, but we want to use it in an operational way for this paper. It represents the totality of interacting systems of which tightly bound local communities, mutual aid networks that reach across a region, and effective, mutually knowledgeable and respectful relationships that connect vertically situated organizations to the locality. It is important to recognize that every local community exists in a context that includes the larger metropolitan area, the state or region, and the nation. These all operate simultaneously and in a way that ideally transfers information effectively and operates with mutual understanding and respect. Operating effectively in this wider context is what Skocpol [13,46] describes as being civic.

This may seem overly abstract and disconnected from the particular action responses that are needed during disasters, but Skocpol gives us specific, empirical case studies of fraternal organizations. Her case examples were tied together at the local, regional, and national levels. Effective operations at each level depended on frequent interaction at each level of aggregation, but also frequent, mutually supportive interaction up and down the system. Hunter [14] gives us a similar account in his description of the integration of national and local neighborhood associations. Shaw and Goda [15] give a specific example of this sort of vertically integrated system in their description of how the Kobe, Japan community responded to a disastrous earthquake and how they and the national government then partnered. This case example is noteworthy because people in the local community were energized to explore and design new local-level interventions that would recognize and address problems they faced in the earthquake. Meanwhile, the national government reached out to form regular, working relationships with the local people and, in particular, to refrain from imposing centralized, expert-informed plans that would negate ideas and designs created by the local people. It allowed for an effective partnership across the whole context of community action.

4.6. Engaging Outside Institutions

Shaw and Goda [15] talk about the effective relationship between the central government and community groups that was established in the wake of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995. After the earthquake struck, there was rapid governmental action to rebuild the infrastructure of areas affected. However, the government did not collect information about personal needs of residents because these were considered private and not the responsibility of government. Especially in the older, inner city neighborhoods heavily populated by seniors, there was widespread dissatisfaction with this lack of attention. In response to this unhappiness, three years after the earthquake, the city administration undertook the People’s Rehabilitation Plan in partnership with local NGOs. There was special focus on listening to residents and building up civil society organizations in the affected neighborhoods. Over a three-year period (between three and six years after the earthquake), civil society organizations were strengthened and policies were created so that in the wake of disasters there would be special efforts to seek out and listen to residents. Local civil society organizations also proposed plans to make the older, urban neighborhoods more resilient in the wake of disasters. Local leaders had contact people in the city administration they could reach out to and to whom they could give local plans for disaster preparedness. City government officials, for their part, were prepared to listen to these plans and support them even though they might be different than what city disaster planners might have in mind. We see a two-sided dynamic where the local community has become organized and oriented to develop their own plans about community protection, and the government has become aware that it tends to develop its own top-down plans and it recognizes that it must reach out for plans offered by community and respect and support what they propose.

Dealing with and recovering from disasters generally requires large-scale assistance from governments and large NGOs. Some of these events require sophisticated interventions and high levels of expertise that must be provided by outside organizations. Often this assistance is carried out quickly with high quality work. But even the best help usually requires that local people be involved and that they take ownership of the processes and techniques brought to them by outside experts. One reason for this is that outside helpers leave eventually. For the work they have started to be continued, local people must be prepared to carry it on. This requires that local people have a full enough understanding of the techniques and processes involved that they can teach it to others in their community. Local people must be convinced that expert procedures actually work sufficiently well that it is worthwhile for them to invest their own resources in repairing equipment or reproducing a procedure the experts have set up.

Outside organizations and agencies also have a tendency to bring equipment that eventually breaks down and cannot be repaired or that is focused on a problem that the local people do not accept [38]. The outside problem definition may not fit the local community’s definition and it may also clash with the way a local culture has historically organized and carried out assistance to community members [32]. Without local buy in, it may be impossible to scale up or “bulk up” an intervention created by experts so that it can deal with a problem where needs are larger than what the outside organization has resources to address [47]. Local knowledge may also may add effective interventions the outside experts would not know about [33].

5. Discussion and Conclusions

Community resilience is a complex, multi-faceted process. Communities that are resilient and effective at rebuilding community processes and programs are those that have strong social capital. However, when most researchers describe the importance of social capital for making communities more resilient, the conception they present of this concept mostly fits the domain of bonding social capital. They observe with admiration tightly structured local networks, patterns where people interact often, help each other, and develop strong mutual trust with emotional support that is effective and freely given. However, the research reviews we discussed [1,3,4] earlier in this paper all find that this conception of social capital leaves out aspects that might be the most important for predicting whether or not particular communities would be resilient. Aldrich [4] in particular argues that communities must connect with the larger urban context through both horizontal and vertical connections and do so in a way that initiates creative and effective helping and mutual aid dynamics.

This paper expands on Aldrich’s [4] discussion by linking conceptions of social capital with the attributes research identifies as characteristic of resilient communities. This paper identified six characteristics of resilient communities: (1) organizations in the community are flexible; (2) communities generate effective leadership; (3) communities learn and solve collective problems effectively; (4) community members cooperate on projects and collaborate on new undertakings effectively; (5) the community has strong social capital, which we interpret as there being an effective, multi-dimensional civic culture; and (6) communities engage effectively with large institutions situated outside the community that are capable of providing substantial resource support. As we presented them, each of these elements grows out of processes that build social capital and they rely on the elements of social capital—bonding social capital, bridging social capital, and linking social capital—being interconnected and supporting each other.

As we discussed each quality of resilient communities, we asked what communities could do to build up the element of resiliency under discussion. History is important in every case. That is, communities could mobilize social capital to foster resiliency if there had been a history of social capital being developed and used in normal social times, in times when there was no disaster. Habits and patterns that grew up as communities solved mundane local problems became patterns that showed organizations and community members how to respond creatively and with courage when disaster struck. Furthermore, it is important for community leaders, organizations, and active citizens to create processes, patterns of interaction, and habits of relating that foster and build social capital. There are some important techniques, like the self-conscious identification of community assets following the Assets Based Community Development methodology, and establishment of community-wide coordinating arrangements that include diverse social service organizations so that members know each other and are in a position to collaborate widely and creatively when disasters strike.

There is no simple list of cookbook policies that can be used to prepare communities for disaster. Disasters usually cannot be anticipated, the needs they create are unexpected, and communities must be prepared to respond in many institutional areas and across various levels of aggregation. Flexibility must be built into ongoing community processes. When this is done, communities are then prepared to be resilient.