John Plodinec

Planning, Priorities and Resilience

July 25th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

One of the ground rules we in CARRI have set for ourselves in developing the Community Resilience System (CRS) is that it must be outcome-oriented.  As a result, everything in the CRS is focused on helping a community develop and implement a plan to improve its ability to avoid, adapt or learn from adversity.

Developing a plan, especially in a time when so many communities are strapped for resources, means making choices – we are going to do this, we are going to stop doing that, we’ll do the other later.  In the CRS, we invite the community to develop a vision for its future that in effect becomes an operational definition of its common values and aspirations.  This vision becomes the set of scales that the community uses to weigh the many options for action and to prioritize them.

CARRI recognizes that creating a common vision is hard work.  It often requires the patience of Job to reach a consensus about what the community wants its future to be.  But reaching that consensus is essential.  Lacking a common vision, it is virtually impossible to take any long-term action to improve the community. 

Our current impasse over the federal budget is a perfect example of this and a microcosm of the macrocosmic problem that plagues our nation at all levels:  an unwillingness to prioritize because we lack a common vision of what we want to become.  One of the primary reasons we lack this vision is because we do not have a common understanding of the problem. For example, surveys indicate that less than one-third of the electorate understands the realities of where our federal dollars go (40% debt, 40% entitlements, about 15% defense, and the rest everything else).

In developing the CRS, we have tried to provide community leaders with information about their communities – strengths, weaknesses, threats – that they can use to forge the necessary common understanding of the state of their community.  Once that is gained, then achieving a common vision becomes easier (I didn’t say easy!).  That vision can then drive the development of a plan to make the vision a reality.  If done well, the result is a more resilient, more vibrant and more vital community.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

Social Capital: A necessary but not sufficicent condition for a resilient recovery

July 8th, 2011 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

There is a growing (and welcome) recognition amongst many disaster recovery researchers on the importance of social capital in rapid and equitable recovery. This is welcome because all too often disaster mitigation and recovery strategies have ignored this important dimension of our lives.

Welcome as well is a recognition that some actions taken during emergency response may actually erode social capital. Before Hurricane Hugo, in the Charleston region, there was one vehicle access point to Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms. That was the Sawyer Bridge—a drawbridge that was literally spun off its balance point by Hugo’s winds.

Residents of Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms were denied boat access to the island by National Guardsmen. The argument was the islands were overrun with snakes (an unlikely event since a surge would have swept them inland) and that structures were unstable and dangerous. The latter point is valid, but in many other areas throughout the region that actually were harder hit that the two islands, residents could not be stopped from entering because they had multiple points of access. I walked down King Street in downtown Charleston two days after the Hurricane when the street was littered with broken glass and everything from pieces of metal roofs to downed street lights.

From a risk analysis standpoint, the issue was one of someone stepping on a nail or getting cut from a sharp object. I do not question the good intentions of emergency managers here—rather only whether or not they factored social capital into their decision. Some individuals had a chance to sift through their wrecked homes and salvage things that were personally valuable to them. After several days of rain and weeks of being denied access, much of what they could have recovered was no longer recoverable.

Social capital is about holding on to a sense of place and that includes connections to the past. This is why it should be included in our analysis of community resilience.

But at the same time, by vaulting social capital to the forefront, I wonder if there is too much of a backlash.

In the social sciences, we speak of “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for something to happen. A sufficient condition is one that in and of itself is enough to cause something to happen. A necessary condition is just that, but not sufficient to cause something to happen. Water in the atmosphere is necessary for rain, but not sufficient in and of itself. It needs other factors—temperature, etc. to make rain occur.

In terms of resilience, we should see social capital as necessary. Absent strong bonds to community and place, both created by social capital, community resilience will be seriously degraded. But social capital is not sufficient in and of itself to create community resilience.

Aside from social capital, communities need access to resources for effective and efficient recovery. Resources can come in many forms—help from outside volunteers, insurance, donations, government aid, savings accounts, etc. But these are not sufficient for recovery absent a resolve on the part of community members to stay and rebuild.

In addition, a community whose infrastructure is in bad shape before a disaster will have recovery hindered no matter how much social capital they have.

Recovery is about time in a very important way—how quickly a community can rebound from a disaster. Strong reserves of social capital are necessary, but so are access to resources. So is ensuring that a community’s infrastructure is maintained. There are a lot of necessary parts of recovery. None, alone, are sufficient.

John Plodinec

Community Resilience and the Problem of Scale or There are Horses for Courses

July 7th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

In March, I had the pleasure of attending the Resilience 2011 conference where Brian Walker gave an excellent talk that got me thinking about community resilience and the problem of “scale.”  

If we think of a community in terms of a hierarchy of size or inclusiveness (individuals < families < neighborhood < community < state < country), we can see that a crisis can occur at any one of these levels.  If I’m having serious trouble with my kids, which is not a national crisis,  it’s up to me and my family to resolve it.  Conversely, the national debt is a national problem – I can’t solve it at my level (no matter how much I’d like to!).

Walker points out that in eco-systems we tend to focus on the scale of the problem but pay insufficient attention to the levels above and below.  Conversely in communities, we too often ignore the scale of the problem and waste precious resources by trying to solve problems at the wrong scale.  Thus, flooding is best controlled at the community level (or perhaps at an even higher level).  However, I must decide how and where to rebuild if a flood has destroyed my home. 

Poverty provides a good illustration of the problem of scale.  While it is clearly in a community’s (and a country’s) best interest to eradicate poverty, we must recognize that being poor is an individual and family condition – it has to be solved at that level.  The ineffectiveness of most of our federal poverty programs over the last forty years seems to indicate that we’ve been trying to solve the problem at the wrong level.  The relative success of the welfare reform enacted in the Clinton era implies that the proper role for higher levels in problems such as this is to facilitate problem solving at the appropriate scale either through providing resources or by removing barriers.

The myriad of urban renewal initiatives undertaken by our major cities provide more examples.  These efforts attempted to fix blighted neighborhoods by tearing them down and building anew, i.e., imposing a solution from above.  In most cases, this resulted in increases in crime, AIDS and other anti-social behavior with no real improvement (except cosmetic, and that only temporarily) in the neighborhoods themselves.  Initiatives that have focused on solving this problem at the neighborhood level have had much greater success (e.g., David Gershon’s work in Philadelphia).     

For me, these thoughts on the problem of scale thus resolve themselves into thoughts on setting appropriate goals.  Too often, we have seen initiatives started with much fanfare that ultimately failed because their goals did not reflect the scale of the problems they were to solve.  We should not try to “end poverty” but rather help people to avoid or quickly get out of being poor.  We should not attempt “urban renewal” but rather help neighborhoods make themselves safer, cleaner, prouder.  We should worry less about “health care” and more about living healthier lives.  In other words, don’t give out fishes; make fishing poles available and make sure there is someone in the community who is willing to teach how to fish – matching the scale of the solution to the scale of the problem is a hallmark of a resilient community.