Conceptualizing community resilience to natural hazards – the emBRACE framework

Abstract

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.

Measuring the resilience of health systems in low- and middle-income countries: a focus on community resilience

“…All of the frameworks reviewed for understanding community resilience in health systems overlapped three major frameworks – by Norris et al [ 18 ], Patel et al [ 19 ] and Kruse et al [ 20 ]. The three frameworks capture social constructs and variables employed by other frameworks in conceptualising community resilience both for descriptive and analytical purposes [ 36 – 38 ].…”

“…Kruse et al [ 20 ] described three intertwined domains that form the core of community resilience. The domains include resources and capacities, actions, and learning domains.…”

“…We initiated our search by exploring four prior studies on community resilience to develop our search strategy [ 6 , 18 – 20 ]. We then used two electronic databases (PubMed and Google Scholar) to systematically search for existing reviews and to comprehensively search for articles as well as reports.…”

What is equitable resilience?

“…Attempts to operationalise resilience in development and disaster risk management have for the most part focused on identifying critical components that can be acted on in practice (e.g. Béné et al, 2014 , Plummer and Fennell, 2009 , Berkes and Ross, 2013 , Kruse et al, 2017 ). Bahadur et al (2013) , for example, offer ten resilience “characteristics” from literature focused on resilience in social, ecological and socio-ecological systems and applied to climate, disaster and development contexts.…”

Ke garne? How Values and Worldviews Influence Resilience to Natural Hazards: A Case Study From Mustang, Nepal

“…Despite its wide use, resilience remains an ambiguous concept. Most authors use the concept to address the capacity or ability to anticipate, prepare, prevent, or recover from the effects of hazardous events (UN/ISDR 2005;Norris et al 2008;Kruse et al 2017). This capacity is most often assigned to communities or households, because many authors argue these are the most crucial agents for prevention and preparedness activities (Cutter et al 2008;Twigg 2009;Werg et al 2013;Arbon et al 2016).…”