Abstract
Governments are increasingly trying to ensure that communities are resilient to the effects of climate change and encourage community empowerment and autonomy. Local resilience planning groups (LRPGs), which include stakeholders with an interest in a local area, are emerging as one potential approach to building community resilience. A conceptual framework has been developed to identify the common requirements for community resilience, building upon existing work in the wider community resilience literature. Aberdeen Resilient, Included and Supported Group, Scotland, UK is an example of a LRPG. In this study the data collected during a workshop with the Aberdeen LRPG were used with the conceptual framework to identify some of the challenges faced when building community resilience. The study examined whether the Aberdeen LRPG illustrates the challenges and constraints faced by LRPGs more widely, and how the membership influences the potential to develop the attributes of community resilience outlined in the conceptual framework. The thematic analysis of the workshop revealed Aberdeen LRPG’s six dominant challenges: engaging with individuals, culture, attitudes, assumptions, terminology, and timescale. These challenges impede the group in utilizing the skills, knowledge, and resources that its members possess to build community resilience. While the Aberdeen LRPG cannot change all factors that affect community resilience, framing specific problems experienced by the group within a conceptual framework applicable to any community contributes to understanding the practical challenges to developing community resilience.
Highlights
The World Economic Forum identified the impacts of natural hazards as having a significant economic impact on the global economy (WEF 2018)
Five themes—attitudes, assumptions, terminology, timescale, and culture—inhibit the theme of engaging with individuals. These themes and the composition of the Aberdeen Local resilience planning groups (LRPGs) are examined using the conceptual approach to community resilience outlined in this article
The Aberdeen LRPG exemplifies some of the difficulties faced by LRPGs, which illustrates the importance of approaching their tasks holistically
Summary
The World Economic Forum identified the impacts of natural hazards as having a significant economic impact on the global economy (WEF 2018) To address this challenge governments are encouraged to think about long-term sustainability and how they manage the social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate change on their populations (UNISDR 2017). Within international and national government arenas the concept of community resilience is treated as a way to progress towards the objective of sustainable communities (Wright 2016) An example of this is the incorporation of resilience into international agreements, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN 2017), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda (UN 2016), and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR 2015). This definition captures the complex nature and multiple aspects of resilience that these international agreements are seeking to pursue
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