Community Vitality: The Role of Community-Level Resilience Adaptation and Innovation in Sustainable Development (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
Community level action towards sustainable development has emerged as a key scale of intervention in the effort to address our many serious environmental issues. This is hindered by the large-scale destruction of both urban neighbourhoods and rural villages in the second half of the twentieth century. Communities, whether they are small or large, hubs of experimentation or loci of traditional techniques and methods, can be said to have a level of community vitality that acts as a site of resilience, adaptation and innovation in the face of environmental challenges. This paper outlines how community vitality acts as a cornerstone of sustainable development and suggests some courses for future research. A meta-case analysis of thirty-five Canadian communities reveals the characteristics of community vitality emerging from sustainable development experiments and its relationship to resilience, applied specifically to community development.
Resilient and Sustainable Communities
Sustainability, 2018
This research advances our understanding of sustainable community development in relation to complex economic phenomena and psychological processes. The last decade has seen regional and global communities transition through unprecedented economic change. Community resilience offers a framework to guide regional development and explore the sustainability of social, economic and environmental systems to manage change. However, the fundamental constructs of community resilience are still not well known, such as the critical role of emotional stability and residents' perceptions of change. This research explores this relationship in economies undergoing transformations by presenting the results of a survey administered to 663 Mackay and Whitsunday residents in Queensland, Australia. The findings add substantial depth to community resilience theory by demonstrating a positive relationship between emotional stability and resilience and a negative relationship between resilience and perceptions of change. The results also provide insight into the sustainable characteristics of communities to build resilience and manage the transformation process. Future research should focus on further testing the relationship between resilience, emotional stability and perceptions of change within communities at different stages of the transformation process.
The Transition to Resilience: A Comparative Case Study of Two Communities
2015
OF DISSERTATION THE TRANSITION TO RESILIENCE: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF TWO COMMUNITIES This dissertation examines the question of how communities understand their risk related to global economic and environmental problems and how communities respond to those risks. Specifically, using comparative case study, this dissertation examines the sustainability efforts of two communities, Oberlin, Ohio and Berea, Kentucky. Both communities have created advanced sustainability efforts over more than a decade of work and both communities have well‐developed partnerships with the colleges in their communities. It finds that communities are responding to both global risks related to climate change and energy price volatility, but also are making efforts to resolve more localized social problems and economic challenges. This research also demonstrates that communities are particularly interested in increasing their community resilience related to local energy and food production, but also hav...
Community Sustainability and Resilience: Similarities, Differences and Indicators
Sustainability has been a core conceptual framework for community development since the concept was popularized in 1987, although in its essence it reflects a long history of environmental conservation development, emerged more gradually out of ecological studies in the 1980s, but has only recently, since the mid-2000s, emerged as a focus of public interest as a way of responding and adapting to the planet’s growing anthropogenic changes. For many, sustainability and resilience are slightly nuanced perspectives on the same phenomenon. For others, however, there are distinct differences between them, with sustainability’s conservation goals being in opposition to the adaptation goals of resilience. Two major reasons for these confusions are: (1) both concepts are defined and used in many different ways to achieve a variety of political goals that may not reflect their core definitions; and (2) both concepts share similar goals and some common approaches, such as a focus on climate change and seeking a balance between humans and nature. Returning to the core definitions of conservation and adaptation helps to understand these similarities and differences, as well as to articulate indicators for understanding how each applies to community tourism development. Indicators from research in rural Taiwan tourism communities are based on responses to the questions: What does the community want to conserve and how do they want to do it (sustainability)? and What do they want to change and how do they want to do it (resilience)? Preliminary results suggest that the new ideal community is one that is both sustainable and resilient.
Building Community Resilience: Opportunities for Transformation
Ecological resilience is built on the belief that humans and nature are strongly linked to the point that they should be conceived as one social-ecological system. Understanding the natural linkages is important when considering how to cope with climate change. Building resilient communities is one way for us to catalyze local and global transformation. Resilience can also provide an opportunity for people to anticipate change and influence future pathways. This paper will explore some of these future resilient pathways through; a review of theoretical concepts from the major strands of resilience literature, a discussion of the nuanced differences within community and transformational resilience, an identification of some gaps in resilience thinking, and then conclude with a commentary about resilience methodologies.
Defining Community Resilience: Where to begin?
My latest blog - A suggested reset on thinking about the principles of resilience at a community level derived from thinking from 30 years ago (https://t.co/cFSdAsg4W7). Inspired by the early works of Trevor Hancock (Hancock, T. (1981) “Ecological Sanity & Social Justice: Public health in the Age of Osiris,” in Alternatives, 9, pp11-18 & (1989) “Sustaining Health,” background paper, York Conference on Health-Environment-Economy, Faculty of Environmental Studies , York University, Toronto) and elements of the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future: The Brundtland Report (http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm). What do they say about old wine?
Sustainable Community Development, Networks and Resilience
2006
In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, com- munities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify. This is par- ticularly difficult for communities that are marginalized, dealing with poverty, homelessness, and addic- tion. However, social capital can be harnessed to create the commu- nity agency needed to foster sus- tainable development. This paper focuses on the ability of commu- nity networks to build social capital critical to the creation of the resil- ience needed to sustain communi- ties. It draws on a case study of a community-driven initiative taking place on the East Side of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, a community with very low levels of economic capital.
Resilient Communities. Social Infrastructures for Sustainable Growth of Urban Areas. A Case Study
International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning, 2017
Climate change, natural and human-made disasters, overcrowding spaces, waste production, and energy access are just a few of issues that our cities have to deal with. At the same time, cities offer a promising intervention field to foster collaborations in planning and managing sustainable infrastructure for sustainable growth. Creating resilient cities has both social and physical dimensions. Reinforcing local identity and culture contributes to positive relationships among individuals, improving their collective ability to face change. The City of Bologna is engaged in the definition of pilot actions to promote the active participation of stakeholders for the acceleration of Local Urban Environment Adaptation Plan for a Resilient City, linked to Common Goods Regulation: act together (collective regeneration of urban spaces), live together (new welfare, health and well-being), grow together (collaborative spaces for innovative jobs and enterprises). In this context the Research Group of the University of Bologna is involved in the development of a flexible and replicable methodology to support the transition to more sustainable urban context. This paper illustrates this methodology and the experimental study carried on to establish active mechanisms of engagement of citizens, associations, creative communities, private bodies, aiming at increasing community resilience and sensitivity and fostering sustainable growth.
Sowing the seeds of resilience: Community perspectives
The term sustainability is one that has been critiqued as a buzzword which, although popular, holds very little meaning. The same is now being claimed with regard to the term resilience. This research seeks to understand community members’ interpretations of the terms resilience and community resilience in response to the Wellington City Council's adoption of a resilience focused outlook. These plans assert that building the city’s resilience is a collaborative responsibility, inclusive of both the community and Council. With a wealth of meanings connected to the term resilience, it is important to understand the communities’ understandings and expectations of the resilience building process. Joseph (2013) has critiqued the resilience literature, highlighting that it may be used as a way for governing institutions to reduce their responsibilities and instead put the responsibility of community resilience onto community members. As a second research focus, this study explores pa...
Resilient communities: transitions, pathways and resourcefulness
The Geographical Journal, 2015
This is a Review Essay. It uses as a starting point ideas from the recent book by Geoff A Wilson, Community resilience and environmental transitions, to develop arguments about the nature of work by geographers on the resilience of human communities. It considers the legacy of ideas about resilience derived from ecology and engineering, whilst noting a third interpretation relating to adaptive resilience and the contribution of work from psychology on resilience in individuals. The Review addresses the notion of 'community capital', considering how ideas from Pierre Bourdieu have been extended in the past two decades, including attempts to measure various capitals. Scale effects of resilience are examined as is the development of theory linking multi-functionality and resilience. Related work on adaptability and transition pathways are also addressed as are contributions on the resilience of cities and regions. The Review concludes by presenting critiques of some of the work on resilience, whilst referring to potential alternatives and potentially fruitful future lines of inquiry.