Guest editorial

Citation

Upadhyay, A., Sutrisno, A. and Sa-ngiamvibool, A. (2021), "Guest editorial", Continuity & Resilience Review, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 101-103. https://doi.org/10.1108/CRR-07-2021-036

Fostering community capacity to enhance disaster resilience

We are glad to present this special issue of Continuity and Resilience Review on “Fostering Community Capacity to Enhance Disaster Resilience”. The area of fostering community capacity has become increasingly important recently due to the increase in the number of disasters. Disasters emerge everywhere, and worldwide evidence of disasters has shown devastative effects not only on the people but also on the whole community and its ecological systems. The world is increasingly becoming more vulnerable to natural disasters which have caused widespread environmental hazards to the well-being of the whole community area and its ecosystems. Our communities, therefore, need to be more resilient to natural disasters, and resilience is the stability of ecosystems in our communities. Our prime aim with this special issue has been to provide a platform to showcase novel and interdisciplinary research that highlights fundamentally new ways of thinking about the new opportunities that have been created in the area of disaster resilience. We believe that this special issue, with its collection of a very diverse range of papers, accomplishes our goal and provides a launchpad for additional exciting research that will surely come.

The concept of disaster resilience has become popular and has been introduced to many fields after the adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015: Building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters (Manyena, 2006). Disaster resilience, therefore, becomes our common concern for survival in the future; it is the responsibility of the whole community to cope with disaster resilience and prevent ones in the future. Building community capacity and fostering the community-level capacity to enhance disaster resilience is therefore vital for disaster preparedness and response.

In the past decade or so, we have witnessed a shift of research interests in the field of disaster resilience from the studies of decision-making to the investigation of models that emphasize the role of community capacity building.

This special issue contains six papers that come from a wide range of disciplines including business, risk and dynamic capabilities.

The selected papers fall into research papers, literature review, general review and case study categories. The extensive range of methodological approaches represented in this special issue is a testament to the disparate thinking that is now applied to challenges in disaster resilience. It has been an eye-opening experience, but more importantly, it has been a learning experience for all of us as a team.

1. Business continuity and disaster recovery in Ghana – a literature review (Barnett-Quaicoo and Ahmadu, 2021): The main purpose of this paper is to explore some of the disasters which have been suffered by businesses in Ghana as well as the causes, effects and lessons learnt. The study also looks at business continuity and disaster recovery measures that could have been implemented in the examples provided. The study follows a literature review approach by reviewing secondary data on both man-made and natural disasters that have affected Ghana in the past decade through the review of the literature.

2. Intersectionality, vulnerability and resilience: Why it is important to review the diversifications within groups at risk to achieve a resilient community (Chisty et al., 2021): This study was to assess the relationship between intersectionality, vulnerability and resilience with evidence. The conceptual framework developed by the study believed that intersectionality and vulnerabilities intersect and reduce the level of disaster resilience. A qualitative approach was followed with relevant support from both primary and secondary data to conduct the study. The study focused on flood as a specific natural hazard to assess the relationship among the indicators of the objective.

3. Enhancing business community disaster resilience. A structured literature review of the role of dynamic capabilities (Sinha and Ola, 2021): The study intends to understand the role of dynamic capability flow in creating more resilient business communities. The study tries to relate to how continuous learning enables business communities to plan for, respond to and bounce back from disasters. A structured literature review of 38 empirical studies indicates organizational resilience and highlights the dynamic attributes of organizational resilience and the importance of knowledge interactions and information sharing.

4. Resource mobilization and contributing resources to a collective task by emergency responders: an experimental study on collaboration in crisis response (Pramanik, 2021): The purpose of this paper is to contribute our knowledge of how to organize a better crisis response through collaboration. More precisely, what strategies work as drivers for emergency responder teams during collaboration in crisis scenarios. This paper demonstrates which factors are drivers for emergency responders to mobilize resources, especially during crises. It captures the tension between individual and collective goals in crisis response and highlights the drivers that affect decision-making during crises.

5. Community resilience for urban flood-prone areas: a methods paper on criteria selection using the Fuzzy Delphi method (Ali and George, 2021): This paper uses the Fuzzy Delphi method for criteria selection which makes it quite unique.

6. A systematic literature review of community disaster resilience: main and related research areas and agendas (Upadhyay and Sa-ngiamwibool, 2021): This is an interesting paper and follows the systematic literature review approach to explore this area of research. The strength of this paper is the methodology as it shows a clear application of the systematic literature review approach to a very new area of research.

The wider research spectrum within the special issue published papers confirms many initial perceptions about disaster resilience. There needs to be an increasing focus on the short-term and long-term scientific and technical capacity impacts and underlying impacts on disaster resilience. The area that will probably require even more research is the role of community involvement, awareness, culture, attitudes, motivation, cohesion and awareness of the community in response to disaster resilience and disaster preparedness. The successful publication of this special issue is possible due to the special efforts from the editorial and publishing team members. We would like to thank Ran Bhamra, the editor of Continuity and Resilience Review, for his support and encouragement. We also thank Richard Whitfield, publisher, Dipti Chawathe, journal editorial office and Ananthi Anandhan, supplier project manager to keep us on track and on time.

Last but not the least, we thank all the authors who submitted to this special issue. The strong response to our call made the issue a success.