Journal
NATURAL HAZARDS
Volume 67, Issue 1, Pages 7-24Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11069-010-9654-y
Keywords
Social resilience; Vulnerability; Adaptive capacity; Coping; Participative capacity
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The paper presents contributions to the widespread resilience paradigm from a social science perspective. Certain aspects of social systems, especially their symbolic dimension of meaning, need to be taken into account in the endeavor to research coupled social-ecological systems. Due to the symbolic dimension, disasters are defined as the failure of future expectations, and social resilience is defined as the social system property of avoiding or withstanding disasters. In relation to this, three capacities of social systems (adaptive, coping, and participative) that constitute resilience are presented. The adaptive capacity is the property of a system in which structures are modified to prevent future disasters, whereas the coping capacity is the system's property of coping with calamitous processes that occurred in the past. The participative capacity is a measure of the system's ability to change its own structures with regard to interventions by other systems, decreasing the system's resilience. The concept of resilience provides important epistemological and political insights and can help overcome an orientation tied together with the concept of vulnerability that blocks social capacities for the mitigation of disasters.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available