For the last year I have been chewing on some ideas around developing community resilence and I’ve realised I’m long overdue articulating this into weeknotes. I found weeknotes a powerful way of forming and clarifying ideas around my thesis and I’m now wanting to work steadily towards some funding for research and praxis in this area.
I am most interested in applying my work in my own city, Southampton, simply because its a rich and interesting place to have landed and form a family. Yet, even this one city feels daunting in terms of its scope.
Over the coming weeks I’ll describe the research and practical experiences that I’m having that are shaping how I’m thinking. This time, I’ll describe some key ideas that I’m working with.
Community Resilience
What drives me is a deep sense that we need to prepare ourselves for crises that are happening and those that are to come. This is a broad topic of research and activity in governments and other public and private institutions. It is driven by the rising threats from climate, ecological, political destabilisation, as well as increases in risks from novel diseases and the other crises that arise from our exploitation of that natural and social worlds.
The term “community resilience” is usually used to describe the resilience infrastructures and provisions, often (but not always) provided by the state. Things such as transport, health and sanitation can be rapidly and profoundly affected by different events and processes. For instance, in my region a Local Resilience Forum has considered a wide range of risks and how to prepare from them. I am happy to leave this work to goverment bodies and academics in the field.
However, what feels somewhat neglected is the resilience of the community as a structure - a network perhaps - to respond to crises and destabilising processes. This is the foundation of all other resilience because it is the foundation of the support we provide for each other in a crisis. I think the first chapture of “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire” Greenfield, 2024 describes how the networks of community support resilience (and how responses to crises build community networks). Two related terms are “social cohesion” and “social capital” - concepts that encompass a degree of “goodness” of a social state. Where social cohesion is usually a qualitative measure of how well people belong and feel connected to society, social capital is more a quantitative measure of connection and trust. Whilst I’ve not read it anywhere (yet), it seems to me that community resilience is a process that requires degrees of social cohesion and social capital. I revisit social capital in the next weeknotes.
Finally, I acknowledge that the word “resilience”, particularly when considering the impact of crises on individuals, has been used to justify lack of action or to brush over the trauma caused and worsened by each crisis, as described by Banaji (2024). As we experience increasing crises and shocks, we will need to shed colonial notions of “development” and “progress” and protestant beliefs around the goodness of suffering and trial. Instead, resilience will come from our ability collectively acknowledge and respond to traumas as communities around individuals, and as communities which are fully part of a changing natural world. Sultana (2022, p121) describes this as “promoting care and commoning”.
Systems Thinking
Despite the ambiguous and negative meanings associated with “resilience”, I still find it a useful term because of its links to the concept of systems. Thinking in systems, rather than e.g. linear cause-effect pathways and theories of change, has been instructive for me over the last few months. I have been introduced to the Positive Tipping Points toolkit (PTPT) and welcomed into their community of practice, which has helped me better articulate my thinking and to be more comfortable with the uncertainties that I am experiencing. With a “tipping point” being the process by which a system changes its state (e.g. (a) coral reefs tipping from a state where they are able to fully recover from fluctuations in their environment to a state when they can no longer recover from ocean heat events, or (b) society tipping from a state in which homosexuality is persecuted to a different state in which gay marriage normalised). The idea behind the PTPT is to find ways to recognise and to trigger tipping points that are positive for somebody - ideally everybody - although recognising that different entities will have different impacts from a tipping point is instrumental to systems thinking.
I am particularly interested and concerned about the interplay between fascist and supremacist ideologies, such as those currently blaming asylum seekers and Muslims for all of the UK’s ills, and action on climate and nature breakdown. By considering these connected concerns as a system, I have been able to articulate as a positive feedback loop1 whereby both the destabilisation of natural systems (climate and nature) and the fracturing of society (through actions of fascist and supremacist actors) damage the ability to prevent and respond to nature and societal breakdown.
I’ve modelled this system using Loopy:
In which current conditions are a fragmented narrative environment and a collapsing natural environment and these are caused by powerful bad actors. The resulting community fragmentation and resource collapse both worsening the conditions and making it increasingly difficult for underresourced “good” actors to reverse the declines.
Praxis
Another term I am using to guide my term is “praxis”, which Sultana (2023) describes as “a looping process of theory-action-reflection”. The process of building community resilience and perhaps triggering positive tipping points is, to me, something that will require iterative practice that uses existing learning but applies it in each unique setting. I feel strongly that this is not work to be “done to” the community, but rather to be led by the community and supported using insight from others’ research. Therefore, I am trying to define a body of activity that centres the local community and also develops insights through research and publication in a way that is intended to benefits others through their practice and through policy.
An important part of this work will be to determine ways of monitoring progress that ensure the activities are focussed on the needs and desires of the community, but that can also be used in responses to funders and sponsors, if required. I take a lot from Autesserre’s “The Frontlines of Peace” (2021), which describes how successful peacemaking is a bottom-up activity by the community facilitated by top-down support and that uses measures designed around what matters to that community. Importantly, the process is just as important as the outcome for a lasting social change.
References
Autesserre, 2021. The Frontlines of Peace. Oxford University Press
Banaji, 2024. Against Resilience: The (Anti-)Ethics of Participation in an Unjust and Unequal Public Sphere. doi:10.1080/13183222.2024.2311012
Greenfield, 2024. Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. Verso Books.
Sultana, 2022. Critical climate justice. doi:10.1111/geoj.12417
Sultana, 2023. Political ecology III: Praxis - doing, undoing, and being in radical political ecology research. doi:10.1177/03091325231157360
A positive feedback isn’t necessarily a good thing. It is defined as an interaction between two or more processes, whereby the increase (or decrease) of one process results in the increase (or decrease) in the other. Thus, the worse society fractures, the worse the climate destabilises. ↩
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