ABSTRACT. Community resilience is widely promoted so that communities can respond positively to a range of risks, including shocks, extreme events, and other changes. Although much research has identified characteristics or capacities that confer resilience, resilience is more than simply the sum of these. Resilience is an emergent property-the capacities are linked and act together. We present an empirical analysis of five different capacities and assess how interactions between them confer resilience in two coastal communities in Cornwall, UK. These capacities are place attachment, leadership, community cohesion and efficacy, community networks, and knowledge and learning. Based on a survey and focus group discussions, our results show that residents draw on these capacities in different combinations, enabling resilience in diverse ways. This provides a dynamic and socially nuanced perspective on community resilience as process, potentially informing theory and practice of conservation, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and community development.
The concept of community is often used in environmental policy to foster environmental stewardship and public participation, crucial prerequisites of effective management. However, prevailing conceptualizations of community based on residential location or resource use are limited with respect to their utility as surrogates for communities of shared environment-related interests, and because of the localist perspective they entail. Thus, addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which tend to involve transnational social and environmental interactions, urgently requires additional approaches to conceptualizing community that are compatible with current globalization. We propose a framing for redefining community based on place attachment (i.e., the bonds people form with places) in the context of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Area threatened by drivers requiring management and political action at scales beyond the local. Using data on place attachment from 5,403 respondents residing locally, nationally, and internationally, we identified four communities that each shared a type of attachment to the reef and that spanned conventional location and use communities. We suggest that as human-environment interactions change with increasing mobility (both corporeal and that mediated by communication and information technology), new types of people-place relations that transcend geographic and social boundaries and do not require ongoing direct experience to form are emerging. We propose that adopting a place attachment framing to community provides a means to capture the neglected nonmaterial bonds people form with the environment, and could be leveraged to foster transnational environmental stewardship, critical to advancing global sustainability in our increasingly connected world.
Most climate related hazards in Bangladesh are linked to water. The climate vulnerable poor-the poorest and most marginalized communities living in remote villages along Bangladesh's coastal zone that are vulnerable to climate change impacts and who possess low adaptive capacity are most affected by lack of access to safe water sources. Many climate vulnerable poor households depend on small isolated wetlands (ponds) for daily drinking water needs and other domestic requirements, including cooking, bathing and washing. Similarly, the livelihoods of many of these households also depend on access to ponds due to activities of small-scale irrigation for rice farming, vegetable farming and home gardening. This is particularly true for those poorest and most marginalized communities living in Satkhira, one of the most vulnerable coastal districts in south-west Bangladesh. These households rely on pond water for vegetable farming and home gardening, especially during winter months. However, these pond water sources are highly vulnerable to climate change induced hazards, including flooding, drought, salinity intrusion, cyclone and storm surges, erratic rainfall patterns and variations in temperature. Cyclone Sidr and Cyclone Aila, which hit Bangladesh in 2007 and 2009 respectively, led to a significant number of such ponds being inundated with saline water. This impacted upon and resulted in wide scale implications for climate vulnerable poor households, including reduced availability of safe drinking water, and safe water for health and hygiene OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2013, 5 1511 practices and livelihood activities. Those households living in remote areas and who are most affected by these climate impacts are dependent on water being supplied through aid, as well as travelling long distances to collect safe water for drinking purposes.
Evidence indicates ongoing tensions over effective climate change adaptation measurement. Focusing on community‐based adaptation (CBA), we stress that some of these tensions stem from a lack of transparency around the knowledge and learning needs of different stakeholders engaged in CBA investments. Drawing on a participatory assessment of stakeholder information needs and appropriate scales required for effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for CBA, this article presents a new M&E for CBA framework. The framework identifies four levels at which M&E is to be undertaken by CBA practitioners and associated project stakeholders: participatory M&E at community level; M&E at individual project level and comparison across multiple project sites; M&E of capacity of institutions implementing CBA; and M&E of community of practice. The proposed framework tailors its M&E approaches according to these levels. By moving beyond the existing dominant donor‐driven M&E perspective, we argue that this more nuanced approach enhances the usefulness of M&E by ensuring that the accountability of stakeholders engaged in CBA landscapes is legitimate across multiple scales. The framework is applicable for M&E of general development practice, as well as the climate change adaptation and resilience remit.
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