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Decision-makers, practitioners and community members have a need to assess the disaster resilience of their communities and to understand their own capacities in disaster situations. There is a lack of consensus among researchers as to what resilience means and how it can be measured. This paper proposes a novel technique to achieve consensus among stakeholders on definitions, objectives and indicators for measuring a key dimension of community disaster resilience (CDR), physical infrastructure (PI).

This study uses a five-step approach utilizing Q-methods to contextualize a resilience index for PI. Interviews, focus groups and Q-sorting workshops were conducted to develop a tool that ranked measures according to stakeholder preference. A total of 84 participants took part in the workshops across four countries (United Kingdom, Malaysia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka).

The initial set of 317 measures was reduced to 128 and divided into the three community capacities of anticipatory, absorptive and restorative. The physical infrastructure capacity assessment tool (PI-CAT) was then finalized to have 38 indicators that were also ranked in order of importance by the participants.

The PI-CAT can be useful for local governments and communities to measure their own resilience. The tool allows stakeholders to be confident that the metrics being used are ones that are relevant, important and meet their requirements.

The Q-method approach helps stakeholders to develop and use a community capacity assessment tool that is appropriate for their context. The PI-CAT can be used to identify effective investments that will enhance CDR.

A better cooperation among all stakeholders working towards enhancing the disaster resilience of societies can only be achieved if the expectations or the needs of each stakeholder are understood. This study attempts to outline the needs of communities affected by disasters for the purpose of aligning the needs and skill requirements with the abilities of built environment professionals serving these communities. Therefore, the study aims to identify and describe community needs and skills requirements for enhancing disaster resilience.

The study adopted literature review and semi-structured interviews. The semi-structured interviews were conducted with key members of some communities affected by disasters and with some of the professionals who participated in the restoration/reconstruction of those communities. Data obtained were analysed using NVivo 10.

The study revealed the current and emerging needs and skills of communities related to the built environment professionals from the viewpoint of enhancing disaster resilience. Thus, 29 classifications of skill and needs were derived and classified under five major disaster resilience dimensions to include social, economic, technological, environmental and institutional aspects.

This study focuses only of the needs and skills of the “community”, which is the major stakeholder that is basically the receiver of all that the other stakeholders of disaster resilience have to offer.

This study would help the built environment professionals involved in disaster resilience to become aware of the specific needs and skills of the communities affected by disasters for the purpose of developing their competences.

The study findings would be useful for both the built environment professionals and higher education institutions. Because it is important for professionals to update and upgrade their knowledge towards enhancing their capabilities and meeting stakeholders’ expectations in a bid to enhance societal resilience to disasters across all domains of resilience.

When the devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand on the 22 February 2011 the landscape of the city and its communities were irrevocably changed. The purpose of this paper is to provide case study evidence demonstrating the role of a grassroots organisation in shaping a community defined concept of resilience through self-organised disaster response action.

The case organisation, Project Lyttelton is a community group, located in the suburb of Lyttelton, dedicated to building community and resilience through local projects and action. This case study was conducted through in-depth qualitative interviews with key members of the organisation, as well as key individuals in the broader community.

This research has found that Project Lyttelton played a strong role in providing avenues for citizen participation post disaster. Of particular significance was the role of the timebank in providing an already established network for active participation by citizens in the response and recovery. Other findings outline the importance of pre-disaster community activity for facilitating social support and social learning.

This research contributes to the literature by providing case study evidence for the value of a community led and defined framework of resilience. The findings of this work support the need for further integration and support for local community led preparedness and response initiatives and demonstrate the possible value of pre-disaster community preparedness activities. Consequently, this work is of use to academics interested in the role of community following disasters, as well as emergency management practitioners interested in possible pathways for fostering and encouraging locally focused disaster preparedness activities. The findings may also be of interest to community groups working in the sphere of community building and resilience.

As noted in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Framework, disasters are inherently local and ultimately the responsibility of the lowest jurisdictional level present within the impacted area. Given these parameters, this paper aims to sharpen the concept of national resilience by recommending a framework which positions community resilience as an integral variable in understanding the ability of impacted areas to effectively manage the consequences of disasters. Conceptualized as a dependent variable, community resilience is influenced by the relationships government (public) agencies develop with private sector partners and the resilience of relevant supply chains and critical infrastructures/key resources which exist in their communities.

The authors augment a topical literature review of academic and practitioner journals by synthesizing existing findings into a holistic framework of community resilience.

This paper argues that interdependent systems like social and economic networks will ultimately influence the ability of communities to adapt and respond to the consequences of disasters. In addressing the resilience of these systems, all levels of government must recognize and embrace the public‐private interfaces that can improve their ability to manage the response and recovery phases of disaster management. While 85 percent of critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, 100 percent of it exists within communities and impacts the ability of the nation to recover from disasters. Resilience calls upon active management and relies upon assessment and a willingness to take action in the face of adversity.

Resilience is discussed within economics, behavioral sciences, supply chain management and critical infrastructure protection. This paper integrates these research streams to develop a framework for shaping national resilience.

As disaster resilience activities are increasingly occurring at the neighbourhood level, there is a growing recognition in research and in practice of the contributions that community stakeholders can make in assessing the resilience of their communities. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process in deriving a disaster resilience measurement framework by soliciting the perspectives of stakeholders from urban neighbourhoods in two countries. The authors examined their community values, and their perspectives on both the concept of resilience and the essential elements that they believe would contribute to the resiliency of their neighbourhoods.

The authors used an appreciative inquiry approach to draw out the perspectives of 58 stakeholders from nine focus groups in five urban neighbourhoods in New Zealand and in the USA.

Results of this research show common values and recurring perceived characteristics of disaster resilience across the study sites. A neighbourhood-based disaster resilience measurement framework is developed that encompasses individual/psychological, socio-cultural, economic, infrastructural/built, and institutional/governance dimensions of disaster resilience. In the process of developing the framework, the authors identified challenges in engaging certain segments of the population and in accounting for wider structural influences on neighbourhood resilience.

Issues relating to inclusive community engagement and linkages to cross-scalar resilience factors need to be addressed in future studies.

Results of this research provide insights and guidance for policy makers and practitioners when engaging communities in the development of resilience metrics.

This study fills the literature gap in evaluating community values and stakeholders’ perspectives on disaster resilience when identifying metrics for resilience interventions in urban neighbourhoods. The proposed measurement framework is derived from cross-cultural and diverse socioeconomic settings.

Since 4 September 2010, the greater Christchurch region has endured a series of destructive earthquakes. As a result, food resilience, as a component of community resilience, has become highly relevant. This paper aims to explore the role of social entrepreneurs and the local food system in building community resilience.

Using a quasi-case study method, four social enterprise food initiatives are presented to illustrate conceptually how these local food systems contribute to community resilience in the post-earthquake context in Christchurch.

The results suggest that a generation of social entrepreneurs have emerged, giving rise to networked local food system initiatives that share the common goals of building multiple and unique forms of capital (human, social, natural, financial and physical). In doing so, they have contributed to creating conditions that support community resilience as both a process and an outcome in post-earthquake Christchurch.

This research included only four enterprises as the case study, all located in central Christchurch. As such, the results are indicative and may not represent those found in other contexts.

The research suggests that social entrepreneurs make a significant contribution to both enhancing food security and building community resilience post-disaster. How policy infrastructure can empower and enable entrepreneurs’ post-disaster warrants further consideration.

Collectively, the four enterprises included in the research were found to have created local solutions in response to local problems. This embeddedness with and responsiveness to the community is a characteristic of resilient communities.

Post-earthquake Christchurch is a living laboratory in relation to understanding community resilience. The processes by which it is occurring, how it is sustained over time and the shapes it will take in the future in such a dynamic environment are not yet understood. This paper contributes to understanding local food systems as part of this process.

Floods are among the most frequent urban disasters in cities of the global south where capacity and resource limitations collude with rapid urbanization to force many poor people to live in flood prone settlements. This paper investigated the impact of flood disasters on social resilience of low-income communities in Mzuzu City, Malawi.

Using a quantitative design, 345 households were interviewed in Zolozolo West and Mzilawaingwe Wards in Mzuzu City. The survey instrument achieved a 100% response rate. A reliability test using Cronbach’s alpha showed internal consistency of survey instrument at 0.711 for Zolozolo West Ward and 0.730 for Mzilawaingwe Ward.

Out of the eleven indicators of social resilience used in this study, six indicators showed no correlation with the outcome expectancy of social resilience. Of the five indicators that showed relationship with social resilience, only improvisation and inventiveness (r_s = 0.356, p = 0.000 at two-tailed, n = 213; r_s = 0.610, p = 0.000 at two-tailed, n = 132) had a strong relationship with the outcome expectancy of social resilience.

The study was only conducted in two settlements; caution should be observed when generalizing the results.

Practitioners should ensure that social resilience strengthening mechanisms are incorporated in flood risk management as they strive to achieve SDG 11 of making cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

The study showed how floods can negatively impact the social resilience of low-income communities, which is different from common knowledge that floods can enhance community social resilience.

This paper aims to contribute to entrepreneurship theorising by highlighting the salience of feminine caring positions in creating novel entrepreneurial roles and investigating how these roles contribute to community resilience. Using a critical feminist economics lens, alternative conceptualisations of the economy are expanded upon to reveal how an economic externality influences entrepreneurial discourse, gender roles and community resilience.

In this interpretive approach, empirical evidence is drawn from six months of intensive ethnographic research with 20 tourism handicraft micro-entrepreneurs in Crete and Epirus, Greece, in 2012 and hence in the context of a macroeconomic crisis. Ethnographic interviewing and participant observation are used as the methods to achieve the research objectives.

Thematic analysis is used to investigate how gender roles and entrepreneurial roles interact and how this interaction influences community resilience to an economic crisis. Using the critical theory to critique neoclassical economics interpretations of entrepreneurship, it becomes evident that politico-economic structures perpetuating feminised responsibility for social reproduction configure feminine entrepreneurial roles, and these roles have a positive effect on increasing community resilience. By conceptualising entrepreneurial involvement as being primarily for community gain, participants highlight how feminine entrepreneurial discourse differs from the neoclassical economics entrepreneurial discourse of entrepreneurial involvement being primarily for individual gain.

This paper contributes to theoretical advancements on the role of gender in entrepreneurship and community resilience by investigating the entrepreneurs’ gendered responses to an exogenous shock. Providing insight into the role gender has in entrepreneurial adaptation and sustainable business practices means that new policies to combat social exclusion and promote rural development can be formulated.

The theoretical interplay between gender and entrepreneurship is investigated from a novel angle, that of critical feminist economics. The relationship between feminised interpretations of entrepreneurship and community resilience is brought to light, providing a unique insight into entrepreneurial resilience.

This research aims to examine pathways for providers to facilitate social resilience in service communities to promote collective well-being and engagement.

Using abductive and metaphorical analysis, this study develops insights leveraging: the transdisciplinary field of molecular biology where 150 years of research demonstrates how cells build resilience through clustering together in a hostile environment; and case data collected with nonprofit service communities to help ground and elaborate upon the metaphorical analogues of cellular concepts.

This analysis uncovers the emergent processes of communal protection, communal adaptation and communal training within customer-to-customer service interactions. Findings identify novel drivers, such as the sharing of vulnerability markers and pre-training for community stressors, as well as pathways through which social resilience within service communities promotes habitual and transformative value, as well as collective well-being.

Service leaders can build upon the ideas in this research to understand the nature of social resilience and to intentionally design communal experiences and interactions that promote greater well-being and brand engagement.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, along with the UN Development Goal for building a more resilient society, highlights the acute needs for a deeper understanding of social resilience. However, resilience-related research in marketing primarily focuses on individual-level coping. This research provides a deeper understanding of the drivers and outcomes of social resilience in service communities and offers a catalyst for future research on the topic.

The civil war prompted many Tamils to flee Sri Lanka as refugees. Several researchers have documented psychological distress and trauma among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, but the literature lacks sufficient discussion of resilience among this population. Although Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have experienced conflict and loss, they have also demonstrated positive adaptation following these challenges. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present study used an ecological approach, in which the effect of the environment on a person is regarded as significant, to explore resilience among Sri Lankan Tamils living in refugee camps in India.

Through a qualitative investigation of refugee experiences of war and camp life, the authors developed a conceptual framework for understanding individual and collective resilience among refugees.

Additionally, the results of this study need to be interpreted with caution because participants were camp refugees, which may limit the applicability of these results with refugees who live in different settings.

The current research results show that intervention programs should have multiple components, including trauma intervention to address the individual and community psychological and psychiatric effects of war and migration experiences and psychosocial interventions to address individual, family, community dynamics and daily stressors.

The study participants stated that Sri Lankan Tamil refugees are using their resilience traits including will power, positive talk, practical solutions, social support, religion and social networks to remake their broken souls.

Future studies need to be conducted with other refugee group to validate the findings of the paper.