How Can Local Governance Systems Strengthen Community Resilience? A Social-Ecological Systems Approach

Abstract

At their core, donor-funded climate and disaster resilience programmes provide goods and services to help build assets and minimise the impact of shocks and stresses on people's lives and livelihoods. Little is known, however, about the way local risk governance systems and the broader institutional arrangements, in which they are embedded, mediate people's access to these services and therefore lead to improved resilience. Drawing on Social-Ecological Systems theory, we explore those characteristics of risk governance systems believed to be more favourable for building resilience at the community level in different developing country contexts. These include: diversity; polycentricism and connectivity; decentralisation and flexibility; participation and community engagement; and, learning and innovation. This review paper proposes a conceptual framework and assesses the evidence linking risk governance and access to the services needed to build resilient outcomes, drawing particularly on evidence from the Sahel and Horn of Africa. In doing so, we can start to understand where the entry points might be for strengthening resilience and the conditions needed for community-level initiatives to be brought to scale from the bottom up.

Community resilience implications for institutional response under uncertainty: Cases of the floods in Wayanad, India and the earthquake in Port‐au‐Prince, Haiti

“…The above trajectories of community resourcefulness, solidarity, and mutual trust illustrate contextual understandings of 'community resilience in action' defined by Imperiale and Vanclay (2016) "as a complex of social processes that allow local communities to self-organize and enact positive collective action for community survival and wellbeing" (p. 207). We concur the need for a better understanding of intentional and spontaneous behavior of affected communities (Imperiale & Vanclay, 2021;Maynard et al, 2018;Twigg & Mosel, 2017), the extent of social capital that is mobilized (Adger, 2003;Morrison et al, 2017), and the relationship of communities with existing governance during unprecedented events in post-disaster contexts (Carabine & Wilkinson, 2016;Fan, 2015;Imperiale & Vanclay, 2020). In particular, despite valuable insights on the above aspects through cases in high-income contexts such as Italy analyzed by Imperiale and Vanclay (2016, the literature is still scarce on the reciprocal influence of community resilience in action to institutional responses in developmental contexts.…”

“…Recent literature has attributed the extent of community resilience to various factors. From an institutional perspective, these include the political will from various levels of government institutions (Ali & Jones, 2013), iterative social learning and "cross-scale institutional linkages" (Choudhury et al, 2019(Choudhury et al, , p. 1761Imperiale & Vanclay, 2021), and decision-making that is decentralized and flexible (Carabine & Wilkinson, 2016;Koshy, 2022). From a community perspective, how communities interact with each other, what kind of meaning they afford to their places of living, how they manage their resources, and what kind of social relationships they foster are considered immensely important to enable resilience (Skerratt, 2013).…”

Uneven local implementation of federal policy after disaster: Policy conflict and goal ambiguity

“…Adding to this, the loss of federal fiscal and regulatory power in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in "coercive federalism", or a system that has caused greater political competition between federal, state, and local governments (Kincaid, 1990;Volden, 2005). While the federal government has increasingly played a larger role in recovery from and mitigation against environmental hazards, the majority of environmental federalism literature continues to promote the idea that local government is the appropriate level of government to make decisions regarding how communities should recover from and mitigate against natural hazards (Adler, 2005;Bang, 2013;Birkland & Waterman, 2008;Carabine & Wilkinson, 2016;De Sherbinin et al, 2016;Gordon, 1983). From a municipal perspective, environmental hazards result in consequences including long-term loss of municipal revenue (Chang, 1983), which disproportionately impacts rural areas (Jolley et al, 2018).…”

An exercise in disaster: Does policy learning occur after a tabletop crisis scenario?

“…The objective of this study is to assess the extent to which a tabletop exercise can enhance resilience by promoting interagency coordination, policy learning, and heightened risk perception. Resilience is the ability of a community or organization to bounce back from a crisis or disaster (Aldrich, 2012; Carabine & Wilkinson, 2016; Taylor & Birkland, 2019). The central theory of this study is that tabletop exercises serve as a way of simulating the experience of a crisis in ways that the actual experience of a crisis can promote resilience (Albright & Crow, 2021).…”