How to enhance community resilience?

A thumbnail guide for change makers and strategists

Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

Resilience is the new mantra. The Corona pandemic, a provisional culmination of a series of societal shocks of increasing weight and frequency, underlines the fragility of our infrastructures and systems, serviced by both private sector actors and public authorities, in advanced and emerging economies alike.

Traditional, static ‘measures of progress of societies’ such as ‘quality of life’ are not able to capture the ability of communities to successfully withstand these kinds of pressures. The realisation is quickly dawning that policies across sectors need to be designed to contribute to community resilience.

Broadly there are two conceptions of resilience:

• The notion of ‘engineering resilience’ implies the capacity of a system to return to an equilibrium or steady-state after a disturbance. This view of resilience is very prominent in emergency and disaster contexts to respond to sudden, large and turbulent events.
• Alternatively, the notion of ‘evolutionary resilience’ is not conceived as a return to ‘normality’ but rather as the ability of complex socio-ecological systems to prepare, change, adapt and transform in response to internal and external stresses.

It is the latter, more encompassing concept of resilience that seems most relevant in the current context where we can expect multi-dimensional stresses on communities to gain in persistence and intensity.

A wide range of conceptual analyses have been proposed of the factors underpinning community resilience. An underlying pattern that emerges from these analyses is the fact that resilience hinges on two critical elements:

• the presence of critical resources (or assets) in communities supplemented by
• the presence of community functions (or capacities) to make productive use of these resources.

Community Resilience hinges on the presence of critical Community Resources and Community Functions.

A resilient community can therefore be defined as follows:

A community that, on an ongoing basis, has access to robust essential community resources, embedded in a societal system based on democracy, social cohesion and equity and is able to identify and mobilize those resources to prepare, adapt and transform in response to external and internal disturbances and stresses, while maintaining essential functions and advancing its quality of life.

Community resources can be categorised as economic, social-cultural, human, ecological, infrastructural and governance resources. Their robustness hinges on three characteristics: performance, diversity and redundancy. In other words: resources need to be of good quality, plentiful and diverse so as to be able to buffer external shocks.

The adaptiveness of the community rests in the presence of three crucial community functions:

• Geographical place-based identity: acknowledging the assets of diversity as a starting point for increasing social capital and social cohesion, leading to shared expectations as regards community’s fate and future.
• Innovative transformative learning: the ability to experiment, learn, develop new practices and reconfigure resources in order to adapt to changing environmental demands.
• Connectedness: the ability to connect with others inside and outside the community in order to exchange information and experiences and to draw on resources beyond community borders.

What does this mean for change agents who wish to contribute to community resilience?

Let’s consider the activity model shown below.

A generic learning system to enhance community resilience

It represents a generic system, understood as a set of mutually dependent activities, that is able to fulfill the purpose of enhancing community resilience. The overall shape reflects an ongoing learning cycle.

The activities included in this generic model are the following:

• Develop a vision on community resilience: articulates an ambition with respect to supporting community resilience.
• Build a systems view on community resilience: aims to understand what community resilience are and how this is influenced by the wider system.
• Map key levers in societal service systems: aims to understand how key flows and systems (energy, water, food and others) may contribute to community health and resilience.
• Build skills and narratives to facilitate working across boundaries: actively develops synergies and alliances with other actors and stakeholders.
• Map community health and resilience deficits: aims to understand where priority needs are.
• Develop indicators: identifies assessable criteria for success.
• Invest in community resources: intervenes in order to enhance community resources.
• Invest in community functions: intervenes in order to enhance community capacities to make use of their resources.
• Extract learning: supports an infrastructure and networks to progressively deepen understanding about what works and doesn’t.
• Scale up proven practices: expands best practices to a larger number of people and communities.

This top level activity model allows funders and change makers to position their contribution and seek alliances with partners who might be able to offer complementary skills and assets for collective impact.

Acknowledgement: we are grateful for the funding by the JPB Foundation that supported the development of these ideas. Thanks also to Nieves Ehrenberg, Senior Fellow at the International Federation of Integrated Care, and em. prof. dr. Jan De Maeseneer, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Ghent University, for helpful comments. Errors remain the author’s sole responsibility. Visuals by Ine Bailleul from Karte Blanche.