Conceptualizing community resilience to natural hazards – the emBRACE framework

Abstract

Abstract. The level of community is considered to be vital for building disaster resilience. Yet, community resilience as a scientific concept often remains vaguely defined and lacks the guiding characteristics necessary for analysing and enhancing resilience on the ground. The emBRACE framework of community resilience presented in this paper provides a heuristic analytical tool for understanding, explaining and measuring community resilience to natural hazards. It was developed in an iterative process building on existing scholarly debates, on empirical case study work in five countries and on participatory consultation with community stakeholders, where the framework was applied and ground-tested in different contexts and for different hazard types. The framework conceptualizes resilience across three core domains: resources and capacities; actions; and learning. These three domains are conceptualized as intrinsically conjoined within a whole. Community resilience is influenced by these integral elements as well as by extra-community forces, comprising disaster risk governance and thus laws, policies and responsibilities on the one hand and on the other, the general societal context, natural and human-made disturbances and system change over time. The framework is a graphically rendered heuristic, which through application can assist in guiding the assessment of community resilience in a systematic way and identifying key drivers and barriers of resilience that affect any particular hazard-exposed community.

Measuring the resilience of health systems in low- and middle-income countries: a focus on community resilience

“…We initiated our search by exploring four prior studies on community resilience to develop our search strategy [6,[18][19][20]. We then used two electronic databases (PubMed and Google Scholar) to systematically search for existing reviews and to comprehensively search for articles as well as reports.…”

“…All of the frameworks reviewed for understanding community resilience in health systems overlapped three major frameworksby Norris et al [18], Patel et al [19] and Kruse et al [20]. The three frameworks capture social constructs and variables employed by other frameworks in conceptualising community resilience both for descriptive and analytical purposes [36][37][38].…”

“…Kruse et al [20] described three intertwined domains that form the core of community resilience. The domains include resources and capacities, actions, and learning domains.…”

“…Such learning includes awareness of potential, current or past hazards, ability to recognise when hazards require immediate response, opportunities for testing different innovative approaches for addressing the hazards, disseminating of effective approaches, and monitoring and review of existing processes for mitigating hazards within the community. The domains by Kruse et al [20] are intertwined to emphasise that they are intrinsically linked to contribute to community resilience. The Kruse et al [20] framework further describes context-specific factors for natural disaster management (that may be external to the community), which may not be readily transportable for discussing other types of shocks.…”

Towards a legal toolkit for disaster resilience and transformation

“…They are essential to reducing existing risks posed by natural hazards, preventing new risks from arising and making people safer’ (IFRC and UNDP, 2015, p. 5). Legal measures and frameworks are considered within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 , most prominently in ‘Priority 2: Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk’, 1 and are integrated into numerous resilience frameworks (Garmestani and Benson, 2013; Garmestani and Allen, 2014; Kruse et al, 2017). Disaster resilience is aware of law and conscious that it can play an important part in changing the nature and orientation of disaster risks.…”