Can community-based adaptation increase resilience?

Abstract

A central claim of community-based adaptation (CBA) is that it increases resilience. Yet, the concept of resilience is treated inconsistently in CBA, obscuring discussion of the limitations and benefits of resilience thinking and undermining evaluation of resilience outcomes in target communities. This paper examines different participatory assessment activities carried out as part of CBA case studies in Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands. The activities and their outputs were assessed against ten characteristics of resilience previously identified in a systematic review. The findings offer support to the claim that CBA can build resilience in target communities, revealing the inherent strengths of CBA in relation to resilience. However, it is necessary for CBA assessments to simultaneously incorporate activities that consider cultural, political, economic and ecological factors influencing resilience within and between communities. This may demand multiple staff with different skills. The findings also highlight the importance of politics and power in shaping adaptive capacity. In particular, addressing the highly context specific nature of social, cultural and political relations demands an approach that is situated in and responsive to local realities. Overall, our case study suggests that using the ten characteristics as an analytical framework offers support to practitioners looking to develop, implement or evaluate CBA assessment activities. Yet within this, it is critical that a focus on increasing resilience through CBA does not preclude transformation in social relations. Realising the potential to support resilience and transformation requires CBA practitioners to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of resilience, whilst also paying close attention to multiple potential barriers to equitable adaptation.

Operationalizing resilience for conservation objectives: the 4S's

“…Corrections in management following such review (a process known as double‐loop learning) (Petersen et al ) can help this applied resilience planning process meet conservation objectives. Community‐based adaptation requires resilience in economic, ecological, and cultural realms simultaneously (Ensor et al ); a state change in any will affect and may derail the others. Recognizing that social systems are intertwined with the natural environment is essential (Farley & Voinov ).…”

Who Manages Space? Eco-DRR and the Local Community

“…Since the beginning, the project's emphasis was on community participation as its core activity. Engaging the community to be part of the program was seen as a feasible alternative to centralized and bureaucratic governance systems [58][59][60][61][62]. Since then, the project has used crowdfunding to expand its funding scope to reduce vulnerability on the north coast of Java.…”

Variation in perception of environmental change in nine Solomon Islands communities: implications for securing fairness in community-based adaptation

“…In this context, survey data alone is insufficient for identifying local changes that lead to designing adaptation pathways. Mixed methods, including ethnographic and ecological techniques, may be required to reveal the complex relationships between change, risk and how perceptions are formed and to disentangle environmental variability, shifting baselines and discourses (Ensor et al 2016). Such an approach would go beyond vulnerability and risk assessment methods currently prevalent in the Pacific region (Hay and Mimura 2013).…”

“…Community-based alternatives to top-down governance are invoked precisely to account for this diversity and to harness local understandings of change (Green et al 2010), and community-based adaptation approaches in particular have received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners (Ensor et al 2016;Ensor et al 2014;Spires et al 2014;Forsyth 2013;Dodman and Mitlin 2011). Local ecological knowledge can provide information about slow and rapid climate and ecological changes at the community level (Sagarin and Micheli 2001;Couzin 2007;Alexander et al 2011) and also play an important role in defining the way environmental change is interpreted and understood as risk (Adger et al 2013;Brook and McLachlan 2008;Naess 2013;Aswani and Lauer 2014).…”