Building rural community resilience: The case of gem extraction in flood-affected areas of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lankan gem mining and extractive industry communities experience enormous amounts of devastation from mass flooding events. Despite the pressing importance of understanding Gem Mining Community Resilience (GMCR) vis-à-vis community flood disaster management, the topic remains under researched. In order to address this gap in the extant literature, this study investigates the resilience of Sri Lankan gem mining communities’ social support network legacies (mitigation and adaptation) in response to a 2017 mass flooding event. Survey data were collected from 167 flood-affected gem mining households (GMHs) in fifteen local administrative units (GNDs) located in two Sri Lankan divisional secretariat divisions (DSDs). Social Network Analysis (SNA) is deployed to investigate the changing contours of social support network centralities before, during, and after the flooding event. Results suggest that the social support network legacies of the surveyed communities evolved over different flood-inundation phases in different geographical settings, thus improving GMCR. Flood inundation depth impacted network activities as well. Multi-actor social support networks working in concert with social capital legacies have shaped the processes of resource mobilization and flood victim livelihood revivification. These mitigation and adaptation practices, along with a GMCR framework developed in the study, may impart lessons for local and national policy, as well as for gem mining communities in other developing countries.