Narrow Results

This reflective commentary is a facilitated exchange between two retired professionals in community risk management for extreme weather events – in two different cultural contexts. Paul Cobbing (formerly CEO UK National Flood Forum) and Ewan Waller (Australian land, forest and bush fire manager and consultant with forty years’ experience) share their insights gained through long-standing experience of working with and for communities. The facilitator is an academic researcher in community-based water risk management. Using case-study examples from their national contexts, they collectively reflect on the role of communities throughout the resilience cycle; the contribution of traditional lay knowledges and cultural practices in local resilience building; the harnessing of different knowledge flows; the importance of understanding communities; the values needed at intersections between communities with the professional world; the implications for the changing roles of risk management agencies; opportunities and blocks or impediments to collaboration; and what matters in the management of partnerships and in drawing strengths in crises. The three discussants conclude by highlighting seven important cross-cutting themes or principles needed in community-led approaches that give or return power to communities to shape the place in which they live, alongside others. These connect different types of local knowledge (indigenous, lay, experiential) for community-centered learning across settings.

This paper discusses the use of green restorative environments to promote aging-friendly communities. The Kawakita method was employed to consolidate residents’ awareness of aging-friendly communities before they were invited to participate in a workshop that involved various green restorative activities. According to the pre-and post-test analysis, 82.3% of the residents agreed that green restorative environments contribute to the construction of aging-friendly communities. That is, the environment significantly and positively influences older adults in the areas of social skills, logical awareness, participation in hobbies, and gardening knowledge.

Life without poverty is a top priority of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While research on poverty reduction has generated knowledge on the nature, antecedents, and effects of poverty (e.g. Alkire and Santos, 2014; Sen, 1981), as well as the management and governance of anti-poverty initiatives (e.g. Zhou et al., 2018), the challenges of poverty reduction have received relatively little attention in the innovation literature. The gap is notable because of the paradox of prosperity, which refers to the problem that the current approach to poverty reduction relies on the “trickle down” effect of economic development, ignoring the fact that economic development doesn’t naturally alleviate poverty via “trickle down” effects. Instead, increasing prosperity tends to concentrate into the hands of a few members of society (Foroohar, 2016). As a result, economic development often fails to generate sustainable prosperity, and even exacerbates the problem in some cases (Christensen et al., 2019). Resolving the prosperity paradox hinges on increasing the inclusivity of innovation eco-systems because innovation is a key driver of economic development. If innovation eco-systems are more inclusive, then the prosperity of those innovations are more likely to be broadly shared (George et al., 2012a). Accordingly, we draw from several theoretical perspectives to propose a novel Anti-Poverty Innovation (API) approach that empowers the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP) individuals through innovation, meeting UNSDGs of poverty reduction, endogenous development, and community prosperity. Overall, this research generates new insights on innovation, the prosperity paradox, and poverty reduction to contribute to the achievement of inclusive global sustainable development.

The concepts “resilience” and “community” appear frequently in research on disasters associated with major society-shaping phenomena such as climate change or urbanization. The chapter seeks to explicate how social science research conceptualizes the resilient community, building on a descriptive overview of disaster studies and climate change adaptation literature. Furthermore, the chapter explores how different conceptualizations of the resilient community frame social futures amid disasters. Three key conceptualizations of resilient community arise from the literature: (i) resilient community of belonging, (ii) resilient community of practice, and (iii) resilient community as an object of governance. Patterns arising across these conceptualizations resonate with previous critiques on how a focus on resilience and communities can serve to suppress the ideas and practices of the social, in line with neoliberal politics. Yet the conceptualizations are not univocally compatible with neoliberalism and can point to a variety of social futures. Conceptualizations of the resilient community can draw attention to the self-organizing of communities, as well as illustrate how a civil society mobilizes around a cause. Ideally, the cause is in line with the interests of the disaster-affected people, who typically are also marginalized in and across societies.

This chapter takes up the question of what kinds of economic cooperation are necessary in the projects of truth and reconciliation in Canada today. In particular, the question of how to reimagine respectful business relationships in the matrices of colonial laws and Indigenous legal orders that coexist across kinship, transformation and time. The chapter begins by setting the 2015 vision of “partnership” offered by the Prime Minister of Canada in conversation with the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and British Columbia’s partnership laws. It then moves into a close and careful reading of the Secwépemc story The War with the Sky People in order to contextualize the myriad ways that responsibility, leadership, community, kinship, intervention, repair, success and story are integral to what it means to do public-private partnership in postcolonial times. By engaging with the conflicts between the Bird, Fish and Sky peoples, a diversity of governance and community ways of being and knowing sits at the heart of this reimagination. The chapter models that the intellectual and affective work of building meaningful partnerships — within families, in business structures and intersocietally — requires a genuine openness to legal pluralism in order to decolonize our current patterns of business storytelling.

The changing consumption patterns and sustainability considerations of tourists encouraged ecotourism across the globe. But without the appropriate management and planning systems, tourism in ecologically sensitive areas could threaten the harmony of ecosystems and local cultures. Tourism projects/models that stress local community ownership and control can maximize environmental and fiscal benefits and empower the community through tourism practices. Mawlynnong, nicknamed as “God’s Own Garden,” is a village in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya acclaimed as the “Cleanest village in Asia” by Discover India in 2003. This case study contributes to the understanding of community practices for the development of tourism within the social and cultural milieu. Participant observation, interviews and secondary sources are used for this study. The results show that cleanliness, aesthetic beauty, matrilineal societal system, empowered women and girls, education, heritage, local community-tourist engagement and basic infrastructure paved the way to a viable tourism development of the society. This sustainable model explores how a holistic and participatory process can bring substantial changes in local communities by creating livelihood, maintaining the natural environment, spreading the message of protection and conservation of the ecosystem, stabilizing local economies and increasing community control.

Among the social determinants of health, social capital is gaining increasing attention in health economics and health policy. Although the boundaries of the concept of social capital are still under debate, the essence of social capital is that of favoring and supporting cooperation within communities, allowing them to supply a range of services which are beneficial to individual health. This chapter, after a brief overview of the debate about the conceptualization of social capital, discusses in some detail the mechanisms which relate social capital to health and offers a review of the recent empirical literature, focusing, although not exclusively, on developing countries. In the second part, this chapter contributes to the empirical literature by estimating the association between individual social capital and health in a cross-country setting including 93 countries, the largest ever used in this literature. Results confirm the beneficial role that social capital has in individual health and unveil a pattern so far rather overlooked, that the influence of social capital seems to be stronger in developed than developing countries. The third part of the chapter focuses on policy interventions and recommendations. It provides a broad taxonomy of policies, motivated by theoretical models of investment in social capital. Next, it discusses a number of academic papers describing and evaluating interventions aimed at creating social capital, and concludes by describing a few interventions realized by two organizations whose purpose is to help communities accumulate social capital.

Disasters, predicted to increase in intensity and frequency in the near future as a result of climate change, are cross-scale in their impact, disrupting functioning across multiple levels of socio-cultural systems in which individuals’ lives are embedded. Governments all over the world need policies to plan support for community preparedness and recovery from disasters and to this end they need to understand and model disaster resilience as accurately as possible. Disasters can be either rapid or slow onset events, requiring differing responses to facilitate resilience. These might be at community and/or individual scales. The interconnectedness of resilience at individual and community scales requires multilevel preparedness, responses and mitigation strategies. A useful lens with which to investigate these interconnections for policy creation is Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory. This chapter describes research conducted in four disaster impacted regional Australian towns using Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory to assess and model disaster resilience. The four sites experienced flood, cyclone, bushfire and drought respectively, resulting in damage running into many millions of dollars. The research validated the use of Bronfenbrenner’s theory for modeling disaster resilience. Results highlighted several important areas for targeted government policy to promote disaster resilience, manage risk and reduce individuals’ vulnerability in diverse settings.