TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring social resilience
T2 - Trade-offs, challenges and opportunities for indicator models in transforming societies
AU - Copeland, Samantha
AU - Tina Comes, Tina
AU - Bach, Sylvia
AU - Nagenborg, Michael H.
AU - Schulte, Yannic
AU - Doorn, Neelke
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - More than any other facet of resilience, social resilience raises the inherent tension within the concept between identity or persistence, and transformation. Is a community the people who make it up, or the geography or physical infrastructure they share? What about the resilience of communities that transform, as a result of a sudden disaster or over time? In this paper, we explore the impact of this tension on how social resilience indicators can be developed and used. Beginning with a close look at the ways in which our concepts of resilience and our use of indicators interact, several points are raised. First, that how we identify a community and frame its resilience conveys particular conceptualisations of resilience, which in turn have normative implications for the communities themselves. In part, this is because of the difficulty in capturing important adaptations and transformative actions within and by those communities. Further, measuring and comparing the resilience of communities, and aspects of quantification that go along with selecting, aggregating and comparing indicator values, ensure that the decisions made about how indicators ought to be used carry normative weight. Through this exploration, we identify several normative implications of choices in indicator design and application. We conclude with recommendations for moving forward with greater transparency and responsibility toward those communities whose social resilience we hope to measure in order to improve.
AB - More than any other facet of resilience, social resilience raises the inherent tension within the concept between identity or persistence, and transformation. Is a community the people who make it up, or the geography or physical infrastructure they share? What about the resilience of communities that transform, as a result of a sudden disaster or over time? In this paper, we explore the impact of this tension on how social resilience indicators can be developed and used. Beginning with a close look at the ways in which our concepts of resilience and our use of indicators interact, several points are raised. First, that how we identify a community and frame its resilience conveys particular conceptualisations of resilience, which in turn have normative implications for the communities themselves. In part, this is because of the difficulty in capturing important adaptations and transformative actions within and by those communities. Further, measuring and comparing the resilience of communities, and aspects of quantification that go along with selecting, aggregating and comparing indicator values, ensure that the decisions made about how indicators ought to be used carry normative weight. Through this exploration, we identify several normative implications of choices in indicator design and application. We conclude with recommendations for moving forward with greater transparency and responsibility toward those communities whose social resilience we hope to measure in order to improve.
KW - Social Resilience
KW - Indicators
KW - Normativity
KW - Transformation
KW - Decision-making
KW - Adaptation
KW - UT-Hybrid-D
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101799
DO - 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101799
M3 - Article
SN - 2212-4209
VL - 51
JO - International journal of disaster risk reduction
JF - International journal of disaster risk reduction
M1 - 101799
ER -
