Social resilience: the forgotten dimension of disaster risk reduction

Abstract

The current thinking in the Disaster Risk Reduction field emphasizes assessment and reduction of vulnerability and especially social vulnerability as an important factor in mitigating the effects of disasters. In the process of emphasizing vulnerability, the role and complexity of social resilience was somewhat lost and at times minimized. For example, Terry Cannon and his colleagues include resilience as a factor of social vulnerability in a report to United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) (Cannon, Twigg and Rowell, 2002). The United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) delineates “Social Vulnerability” and “Individual Vulnerability” as working areas, but does not mention Social or Individual Resilience (Bogardi, 2006)

Developing the notion of ubuntu as African theory for social work practice

“…Contemporary research shows that ubuntu continues to play an important role in African society. It is regarded as a key cultural strength of families (Nkosi & Daniels, 2007), emerges as an important foundation for resilience among the youth (Theron & Phasha, 2015), can shape community responses to disaster (Sapirstein, 2006) and has been used to inform an approach to psychotherapy (Van Dyk & Matoane, 2010).…”

Community response in disasters: an ecological learning framework

“…He considers that community learning is rooted in the 'social memory' of communities. According to Sapirstein (2006), community learning is an important outcome following a disaster and it can be 'locked into' further efforts at building resilience through integrating the lessons learnt with an existing educational curriculum. Preston (2014) has shown that even after a major industrial disaster in the UK, where a large number of children died (the Aberfan disaster, 1966), the dominant paradigm of community resilience did not change.…”

Disaster Resilience from a Sociological Perspective

“…It seems useful to note that social resilience from a sociological perspective is quite different from the defi nition of it by Sapirstein ( 2006 ), who focused attention on his own model of resilience, which comprised the following elements: redundancy through overlapping social networks, strengthening response capacities, supporting self-organization, fostering learning and education, and encouraging adaptation.…”