How rural community resilience evolves after a disaster? A case study of the eastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, China

Abstract

Frequent occurrence of natural disasters has become one of the most serious challenges to human society. As rural communities are the forefront of disasters, enhancing the resilience of rural community is crucial to mitigate the impact of natural disasters and seek rapid recovery. This paper provides an analytical framework for changing trajectories of the resilience of rural communities after disasters. Taking the disaster area affected by the catastrophic debris flow in China as an example, we analyze the changing trajectories of rural community resilience after disaster in three villages with different damage levels from 2010 to 2020 based on the data from key person interviews, the disaster situation and development reports, village work records and farmers’ questionnaires. We found that the changes of community resilience after disaster show obvious stages due to the difference in the intensity of effects of government intervention and community self-organization ability during disaster relief reconstruction period and self-recovery period. The resilience of communities with different disaster losses showed an increasing trend. However, during the disaster relief and reconstruction period, the resilience of the severely affected community was improved faster, followed by the most severely affected community, while the resilience of generally affected community was improved more slowly. During the self-recovery period, the resilience of the affected general community was improved faster than that of the other two communities. The evolution process of community resilience reflects the increasing role of self-organizational capacity in post-disaster community development, aligning with the overall global trend in rural community governance. In addition, there is a significant sequence in the improvement speed of different dimensions of community resilience at different stages after disasters. During the disaster relief and reconstruction period, the resilience of community management was improved faster and the resilience of environment was slower. During the self-recovery period, the economic resilience of community was improved faster and the social resilience was improved slower. Finally, some suggestions were put forward to strengthen natural disasters prevention and community resilience in disaster-prone areas.