What makes communities resilient in times of complexity and change?

Coopetition outside the market economy: Oxfordshire’s community food initiatives as a case study

“…For the purposes of this research, communities are understood as being comprised of heterogeneous organisations, initiatives, and people connected through specific relationships, or who have certain shared characteristics, including behaviours, culture, institutions, location, politics, and values (Korosteleva and Petrova, 2022; Magis, 2010; Staeheli, 2008). Communities must manage various demands, often with limited resources, and with limited control over the conditions that impact them (Magis, 2010; Burnett, 2023; Staeheli, 2008).…”

“…Each of these challenges can impact communities or community organisations. However, rather than trying to find an equilibrium, as in systems resilience, the community resilience literature focuses on supporting self-reliance and self-organising practices (Korosteleva and Petrova, 2022; Folke, 2006). This broader conceptualisation of resilience relies, in part, on the ‘capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize in order to retain the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks’ (Magis, 2010, 403), as well as on the ability of a community not just to respond and adapt to change, surprise, and uncertainty (McDaniel et al, 2021; Folke et al, 2010; Garnett et al, 2020), but to thrive in this environment.…”

Community Resilience in Belarus and the EU response

“…Resilience as an analytic of (self‐)governance focusing on unlocking local resources and communal capacities for transformation in the face of crisis or adversity, has an enormous potential for people who wish to build a life they have reason to value. Notably, by enhancing local ownership and changing the top‐down patterns of governance and outside‐in democracy promotion tools, this could unlock self‐organization and self‐reliance, or what we call resilience elsewhere (Korosteleva and Petrova, 2021). For example, whereas some initiatives, such as the complementary support measures ‘in favour of civil society’ (European Commission, 2017) aiming to enable local communities to be creative about tackling their respective needs and priorities, as part of the European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI) programming (Korosteleva, 2020b), are more in line with complexity‐thinking and supporting the local emergence, the EU still struggles to understand how resilience as self‐governance, especially in crisis, could work in practice, to give an empowering sense of ownership and freedom to communities to fend for themselves.…”

“…We argue elsewhere (Korosteleva and Petrova, 2021) that unlike the mainstream IR or social identity and transition theories, Complex IR shifts away from the Newtonian principles of linearity and causality, whereby it seems possible to expect that, for example, certain levels of economic well‐being, education or external investment may inevitably result in some form of democratic progress and anticipated institutional settings necessary for the endurance of democracy. Instead, Complex IR argues that the world should be seen as an open system, unpredictable and uncontrollable, made of entanglements in constant dynamics, which alter the very nature of objects depending on their positionality, relations and changes in the system.…”

“…Emergence can be understood as a formation of the whole, where the whole is qualitatively more than just a sum of its parts (Kauffman, 1995). In the context of Complex IR, it would also imply self‐reference and self‐reliance which through feedback loops may lead to the emergence of a new order, building on a shared vision, inherent strength, capacities and resources of a system, thus making it resilient (Korosteleva and Petrova, 2021). These tenets of complexity‐thinking naturally lead us to the principal conceptual frame of this article – societal resilience as a process of self‐organization – which encapsulates and explains the gist of the recent developments in Belarus, and helps us understand why the rise of peoplehood as a process of emergence in the country may result in irreversible change.…”