Abstract
More than any other facet of resilience, social resilience raises the inherent tension within the concept between identity or persistence, and transformation. Is a community the people who make it up, or the geography or physical infrastructure they share? What about the resilience of communities that transform, as a result of a sudden disaster or over time? In this paper, we explore the impact of this tension on how social resilience indicators can be developed and used. Beginning with a close look at the ways in which our concepts of resilience and our use of indicators interact, several points are raised. First, that how we identify a community and frame its resilience conveys particular conceptualisations of resilience, which in turn have normative implications for the communities themselves. In part, this is because of the difficulty in capturing important adaptations and transformative actions within and by those communities. Further, measuring and comparing the resilience of communities, and aspects of quantification that go along with selecting, aggregating and comparing indicator values, ensure that the decisions made about how indicators ought to be used carry normative weight. Through this exploration, we identify several normative implications of choices in indicator design and application. We conclude with recommendations for moving forward with greater transparency and responsibility toward those communities whose social resilience we hope to measure in order to improve.
Highlights
It has been accepted for a time that many of the aspects that make a populated area, such as a city, more or less resilient are social factors
The list of items in the social resilience category shows that it makes little sense to compensate a low score on transportation access with a high score on, say, health coverage, as the two items are non-fungible
Incommensurability seems especially problematic for outcome in dicators, where the outcomes often refer to fundamental human values or human rights that are each worthy of full protection, such as access to food, access to medical care, access to education
Summary
It has been accepted for a time that many of the aspects that make a populated area, such as a city, more or less resilient are social factors Consid eration of the normative question leads to a different type of indicator than those already proposed and in use – in the conclusion of the paper, we draw on the observations made throughout to highlight how in dicators could be better formulated and used to describe and measure social resilience. We take a multidisciplinary approach in this paper, combining the expertise of authors who specialise in philosophy of the city, ethics of technology, systems and risk analysis, and emergency management These diverse approaches combine to highlight several aspects of social resilience that make indicators difficult to develop and to use, and that we feel current indicators ought to address more effectively and transparently.
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