Integrating disciplinary contributions to achieve community resilience to natural disasters

Community resilience to natural disasters is a complex social problem that can benefit greatly from truly interdisciplinary research (IDR). While funders and universities frequently endorse interdisciplinarity, much of what actually happens can best be described as multidisciplinary, that is, parallel and additive rather than integrated and synergistic. Moving beyond that is harder than it might initially seem. Doing so requires understanding both the benefits of and barriers to its successful implementation. Benefits include better addressing questions at disciplinary intersections; providing more cohesive, useful recommendations to practitioners; improving assumptions in disciplinary studies based on input from other disciplines; and facilitating idea sharing across analogous parts of the problem, such as different hazards. Barriers include institutional systems that discourage researchers from engaging in IDR, and disciplinary differences that make it difficult to do. The paper concludes with thoughts on how community resilience research can more fully realise the potential of IDR.