Inclusive engagement for equitable resilience: community case study insights

Abstract

Incorporating equity into climate resilience planning, especially through participatory processes, is important to adequately address social vulnerability and avoid reproducing inequities. Recent analyses of resilience and adaptation plans in the United States suggest that there is increasing attention on equity and justice, but a wide variation in how it is being incorporated and implemented. Available studies of resilience planning are limited by their focus on larger urban areas and on plan contents. This research contributes a qualitative analysis of engagement in resilience planning in smaller cities and rural areas. It presents findings from community case studies used as part of human-centered design research to develop an equitable resilience planning tool. Materials from the tool were used to conduct participatory engagement activities including storytelling, mapping, and brainstorming actions that elicited community members’ experiences with hazards and disasters and ideas for equitable resilience actions. Themes that emerged from the qualitative analysis of the workshop discussions were: community members’ include both environmental and social concerns in addressing resilience, challenges associated with social vulnerability framing, the underlying social systems that perpetuate inequities, recognizing different types of trauma, the power of convening, and challenges with sustaining engagement without dedicated resources. This article provides insights that inform efforts to better incorporate equity into resilience planning and advance the study of equitable resilience.