Building a resilient society

Despite its widespread adoption in international disaster risk reduction policy, resilience remains a contested and poorly defined term and there is a lack of research exploring how this policy translates into resilience-building practice, and how resilience is experienced by individuals and communities at a grassroots level. This research attempts to fill that gap, using a case study from England to explore resilience in practice from a top-down (institutional) and bottom-up (community) perspective. The research finds little connection between top-down resilience building and emergent community resilience. Institutional resilience activities are grounded in complicated structures of risk analysis, preparedness, and response focused on major threats in an aspatial and imaginary future. In contrast, community activities are complex and emergent, reliant on the rapid mobilisation of resources towards threats which are localised and minor, but highly spatial and immediate. Societal resilience is therefore more than complex. It must integrate the complicated and complex, bringing together both institutional and community perspectives. To achieve this, the research proposes a new approach which reconceptualises resilience as grounded in the social capital relationships between communities and institutions, and works to overcome existing structural challenges which undermine community ability to organise and collaborate. Adopting this approach requires integrating ‘boundary organisations’, who can negotiate and translate between the complicated and the complex into resilience governance. The findings have broad implications for international DRR and sustainable development, highlighting the need to look beyond traditional structures of hazard management to build sustainable and resilient societies.