As the concept of community resilience moves from the margins of practice and theoretical research to more mainstream scholarship, critical issues of conceptualization and use emerge. This is particularly true at the intersection of community development practice and community resilience theory. This book teases out limitations with current conceptualizations of community resilience, offers enhanced and alternative conceptualizations, and presents compelling case studies of new conceptualizations in action. This book is a starting place for scholarly conversations about the role of community resilience in community development practice. The frameworks presented here, will continue to gain more support in academic and non-academic arenas as resilience rhetoric increases in popularity. However, it is crucial for community practitioners to use these frameworks to actively cultivate resilience in their communities by building adaptive capacity in systematic ways. To move the field of community resilience forward, it is critical to understand the nuances of context and conditions in communities and how broader conceptualizations of resilience account for and utilize context to build adaptive capacity. This book was originally published as a special issue in the journal Community Development.
This book teases out limitations with current conceptualizations of community resilience, offers enhanced and alternative conceptualizations, and presents compelling case studies of new conceptualizations in action. It is a starting place for scholarly conversations about the role of community resilience in community development practice.
Introduction The Limits of Current Models
1. Using disaster recovery
knowledge as a roadmap to community resilience
2. The limits of resilience in
US community responses to recent drought events
3. Community resilience: A
meta-study of international development rhetoric in emerging economies
Reconceptualizing and Measuring Resilience
4. Community resilience and
community development: What mutual opportunities arise from interactions
between the two concepts?
5. A Community Resilience Framework for community
development practitioners building equity and adaptive capacity
6. Exploring
the relationships between local agrifood system resilience, multiple measures
of development, and health in the Southern United States Turning Theory into
Action: Building Resilience
7. Can community interventions change resilience?
Fostering perceptions of individual and community resilience in rural places
8. Agents of changetogether: Using agent-based models to inspire social
capital building for resilient communities
Anne Cafer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi, USA.
John J. Green, formerly with the University of Mississippi, is Director and Professor with the Southern Rural Development Center and Mississippi State University, USA.
Gary Goreham is Emeritus Professor at North Dakota State University, USA.
