Abstract
This article contributes to our understanding of community resilience. Community resilience is the ability of a community to cope and adjust to stresses caused by social, political, and environmental change and to engage community resources to overcome adversity and take advantage of opportunities in response to change. Through an analysis of local responses to multiple challenges, six dimensions of community resilience were found in one village in northern Norway. These dimensions; community resources, community networks, institutions and services, people-place connections, active agents, and learning; are activated in processes and activities in the village to respond to current challenges. Although this corroborates findings from other community resilience research, this research suggests that community resilience is both complex and dynamic over time. Although communities may consider themselves resilient to today's challenges, the rate and magnitude of expected systemic global changes, especially climate change, means that future resilience cannot be taken for granted. This work concludes that there is a risk that community resilience may be an illusion, leading to complacency about the need for adaption to multiple factors of change. Hence, the ability of communities to actively engage in reflexive learning processes is of importance for both adaptation and future resilience.
Highlights
Community resilience is the ability of a community to cope and adjust to stresses caused by social, political, and environmental change and to engage community resources to overcome adversity and take advantage of opportunities in response to change (Buikstra et al 2010, Magis 2010, Ross et al 2010)
These dimensions; community resources, community networks, institutions and services, people–place connections, active agents, and learning; are activated in processes and activities in the village to respond to current challenges
As a way to overcome this, Adger et al (2011) suggest continuous learning and a consideration of the interlinkages of various scales in developing policy responses. This is likely to be important in responding to future challenges and building future resilience. These reflections contribute to the understanding of community resilience
Summary
Community resilience is the ability of a community to cope and adjust to stresses caused by social, political, and environmental change and to engage community resources to overcome adversity and take advantage of opportunities in response to change (Buikstra et al 2010, Magis 2010, Ross et al 2010). A resilient community is expected to be well suited to adapt to current and future changes, including social, economic, environmental, and cultural changes. Despite the historical and current resilience of a community, it is timely to ask whether such resilience will be applicable in the context of future global changes, to the impacts of climate change. Communities may perceive and exhibit resilience at the local scale, they are part of a global system and have to respond to changes affecting them through this connectedness. Anderies and Jansson (2011) argue that in isolation local communities can be robust, but their linkages to processes at the higher levels, including the global, have consequences for their robustness Globalization processes in particular can influence the resilience of communities (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008). Anderies and Jansson (2011) argue that in isolation local communities can be robust, but their linkages to processes at the higher levels, including the global, have consequences for their robustness
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