Urban-Rural Disparity in Community Resilience: A Multilevel Analysis of the Relief Progress after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake

Abstract

• Demonstrates the urban-rural disparity of community resilience via survey questionnaire data. • Reveals the difference in dominant resilience factors between urban and rural communities. • Unfolds the interactions of urbanization and community resilience factors in practices • Highlights public-centric, context-specific resilience policies in coping with urbanization. Geo-physical, socio-cultural, politico-institutional, and techno-economic context affect communities’ resilience competency to disasters. As the contextual characteristics of urban and rural communities differ, they may perform differently in resilience practice. Taking a case of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, this paper explored community resilience in urban and rural areas by employing binary multilevel models against the monthly survey questionnaire data on relief progress at first; and then adopted cross-level interaction models to examine whether and how urbanization would modify the contributions of resilience factors to post-disaster performances of communities. The results showed an urban-rural disparity of community resilience, with rural residents reporting higher relief scores than their urban counterparts. Whilst, resilience factors, including leadership, fairness, and preparedness, appeared to be crucial to both urban and rural communities, problem solving, information and communication, and civic engagement were only contributing to rural communities. Communities featured with different levels of urbanization do not uniformly experience the impacts of community resilience factors. Urbanization was proofed to interfere with the effects of some community factors like problem solving, information and communication, civic engagement, but reinforce that of the preparedness factor. These findings enrich our understanding of the urban-rural disparity in community resilience, and shed light on the importance of public-centric and context-specific resilience policies in coping with the contextual changes resulted through urbanization processes.