Community capitals and disaster recovery: Northwood ND recovers from an EF 4 tornado

Abstract

The literature on community response to disaster emphasizes the significance of pre-existing bridging social capital in determining successful responses. While the social infrastructure in the form of both bridging and bonding social capital facilitates the kind of community action and social organization that allows for successful community recovery from natural disasters, communities are more likely to take collective action in the long-term recovery process if they have the capacity to act. This capacity to act resides not only in a community's social capital, but also in its cultural capital, which determines how a community engages in collective action. The Community Capitals Framework is used in this research to analyze a rural community's disaster recovery efforts. The analysis indicates that cultural, social, and human capitals were keys to mobilizing the political capital necessary to acquire the financial capital, which in turn was required to restore built and natural infrastructure. Unlike previous research that emphasizes the role of social capital as the primary capital to be mobilized, however, this research adds cultural capital as a precursor to mobilizing social capital. Cultural capital determines how a community engages in collective action.