Resilience is the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner. It entails adapting to changing conditions and rapidly recovering from disruption, including through the preservation and restoration of essential basic structures and functions.
Community resilience entails identifying hazards, analysing and prioritising them, followed by devising intervention strategies and actions, to effectively manage hazards. Resilient communities proactively protect themselves against hazards, build self-sufficiency and become more sustainable. Community resilience is often the result of integrating hazard mitigation with other local planning processes that help guide community development.
A community is said to be resilient to disasters if it prevents loss of life and injury; reduces property damage and business interruption; lowers the cost of disaster response and recovery; protects cultural and historical assets; as well as reduces environmental damage, among other attributes.
The following stages are important in building community resilience and they include participatory assessment of hazards, stakeholder profiling and engagement to develop action plans (participatory planning), implementation of action plans, progress tracking or monitoring, documenting lessons learnt and adapting actions and approaches in response to evolving changes.
The first step to building a resilient community is to identify and analyse hazards and vulnerabilities. The objective of analysing the hazards and associated potential risks is to prioritise the most urgent and important actions, as well as determine and allocate necessary resources and capabilities. Hazard analysis, which is meant to understand the potential impacts and consequences of different threats, can be undertaken using risk maps, hazard profiles, vulnerability assessments and scenario planning.
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The second stage in building community resilience is stakeholder engagement. This is key in building trust, fostering collaboration and team work and, more importantly, ensuring that resilience strategies being developed and adopted are responsive to stakeholders’ values, needs and aspirations.
Input from diverse stakeholders is collected through focus group discussions, surveys, workshops and participatory rural appraisal and planning (PRA). PRA is an assessment and learning process that empowers community members to create the information base they need for participatory planning and action. The outsiders contribute facilitation skills and external information and opinion to the process.
Having identified and prioritised interventions, the next step is the execution of action plans. The action plans can be implemented following the disaster management cycle which covers mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery interventions.
By implementing activities using this framework, community members’ mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery is improved, hence resilience. Other frameworks that can be used besides the disaster management cycle to guide actions across phases include resilience dividends.
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The next stage in building community resilience is monitoring, which involves tracking and measuring results and impacts of interventions or action plans. Besides, monitoring is also key in evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of interventions, identifying gaps and strategising on addressing the gaps.
The final stage is to adapt following lessons learnt from implementing action plans and sharing knowledge and lessons learnt. Therefore, capturing and documenting successes and failures of actions enhances learning and innovation capabilities for further improvement of the interventions.
More importantly, it helps to adapt actions and strategies in response to the evolving context of the community. Use of tools such as feedback loops, scenario analysis and adaptive management is vital to further anticipate and respond to emerging and uncertain risks and opportunities that could affect the community, thereby enabling it to become more resilient than before.
In conclusion, community vulnerabilities and resilience are interconnected. A resilience framing resists the idea that communities are passive recipients of assistance or aid. Rather, it emphasises their capacities and resources to prepare for, and effectively respond to, disasters. A resilient community proactively prevents and reduces drivers of shocks and systemic issues that drive vulnerability. Social capital and networks enhance community resilience by providing access to information, resources, services and opportunities, as well as by creating a sense of belonging, identity and solidarity. A resilient community would be able to deploy and adapt community capacities or strengths and resources to mitigate harm during a disaster and to recover from adversity.
