社区恢复力研究进展及其地理学研究议题

Research progress and themes of geography on community resilience

随着人口、资源与环境的矛盾日益加深,灾害已成为可持续发展的重要障碍。在这一背景下,恢复力成为推动社会经济系统可持续发展的新理念和新范式。恢复力研究的范式也由早期的生态恢复力逐渐转向社区恢复力的研究。现有的社区恢复力研究成果主要集中在概念内涵探索、影响因素识别、基于客观指标和基于行动者感知的社区恢复力测度等方面。迄今尚未形成公认的可接受的社区恢复力理论框架;对普通乡村社区研究较多,对特定资源依赖型社区恢复力研究较少;对突发性自然灾害对社区恢复力的影响研究较多,对其他灾害和危机对社区恢复力的影响研究较少;社区恢复力测度方法的适用性和科学性仍待加强;社区恢复力关键影响因素的作用机制仍需进一步探索。在此基础上,提出从地理学视角研究社区恢复力的主要议题,包括社区恢复力的形成机制及其区域差异、动态演变过程、影响因素的作用机理、基于人地关系的社区恢复力感知量表以及具有尺度效应的社区恢复力测度指数等。

Escalating conflicts among population, resource, and environment may have profound impacts on sustainable development. Thus, there is a renewed science and policy interest in the ability of society to cope with and positively adapt to crises and change. Resilience theory has emerged in recent years as a sustainable development paradigm to provide new perspectives on community development and socioeconomic system adjustments to a rapidly changing world. Resilience research has gone through three distinctive paradigms, from 'ecological resilience,' 'social-ecological resilience,' to the most recent focus on the resilience of human systems and communities referred to as 'social resilience.' Existing studies on community resilience are mainly focused on the concept and definition of community resilience, factors that enable community resilience, and measurement methods for community resilience based on objective indicators and perception of various actors. However, there are four deficiencies in the existing community resilience research. First, a commonly accepted conceptual framework for understanding community resilience is yet to be developed. Second, there have been relatively more studies on rural communities but research on certain resource-dependent communities is very few. Third, there is more research on the implications of sudden-onset natural disasters for communities but not on other types of disasters and crises. Measurement methods for community resilience based on objective indicators are not very effective and adaptive for community capacity assessments. Previous studies have not formed a mature scale for community resilience assessments. Finally, there is a need for a much thorough analysis of mechanisms of influence of key factors that have impacts on community resilience. Further studies should strengthen the research on the formation mechanism and regional diversity of community resilience in several different types of communities.More attention should be paid to the dynamic process and factors that enable community resilience. We should commit to developing a more reliable and validated community resilience scale, one that more accurately reflects the concept of resilience. Given this situation, a more careful re-evaluation of indicators of community resilience is warranted.