A question of capacities? Community resilience and empowerment between assets, abilities and relationships

Abstract

The empowerment and resilience of communities in rural contexts is often seen to be linked to their capacities – for example, organisational, infrastructural and personal capacity – and the types of capital – e.g., social, physical, human and financial – that the community can access. While the ‘community capital’ and ‘capacities’ perspectives overlap, they define community characteristics in slightly different ways, with different analytical categories at their disposal. Here, we loosely draw on the capacities perspective and supplement it in a grounded manner with aspects from the community capital literature, to analyse the development of a small rural, dispersed community in Scotland over the course of two years.Our analysis is based on two sets of qualitative interviews with residents of the community and other relevant actors, conducted around an interval of two years, combined with observation of community events in the interim period. While at the beginning of the study, the community appeared a place where people were cautiously hopeful, with an asset transfer planned that was intended to support empowerment and resilience, the case unfolded – at least temporarily – as an ‘unsuccess story’, due to the failure of the asset transfer. Our analysis elucidates how organisational, infrastructural and personal capacities of the community interacted, and leads to three major findings. First, interactions between capitals and capacities are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of a community's situation, but tend to be understudied. Second, capacities can not only be ‘low’, they can also be negative (thus not only neutral but outright destructive), and extremely hard to overcome through standard approaches to capacity building. And third, in our study case, ‘social capacities’ that emerged from people's experiences of social interactions acted as powerful microstructures that constrained individuals' abilities to engage in community action. To conclude, we discuss these findings in terms of their implications for community empowerment and resilience more broadly.