A Critical Review of Social Resilience Properties and Pathways in Disaster Management

Resilience as a concept is multi-faceted with complex dimensions.In a disaster context,there is lack of consistency in conceptualizing social resilience.This results in ambiguity of its definition,properties,and pathways for assessment.A number of key research gaps exist for critically reviewing social resilience conceptualization,projecting resilience properties in a disaster-development continuum,and delineating a resilience trajectory in a multiple disaster timeline.This review addressed these research gaps by critically reviewing social resilience definitions,properties,and pathways.The review found four variations in social resilience definitions,which recognize the importance of abilities of social systems and processes in disaster phases at different levels.A review of resilience properties and pathways in the disaster resilience literature suggested new resilience properties—“risk-sensitivity”and“regenerative”in the timeline of two consecutive disasters.This review highlights a causal pathway for social resilience to better understand the resilience status in a multi-shock scenario by depicting inherent and adaptive resilience for consecutive disaster scenarios and a historical case study for a resilience trajectory in a multiple disaster timeline.The review findings will assist disaster management policymakers and practitioners to formulate appropriate resilience enhancement strategies within a holistic framework in a multi-disaster timeline.

Surrogate Measures to Assess Mobility of People as a Resilience Indicator in Disaster Management: An Exploratory Study in Southeastern Sri Lanka

Understanding social resilience can assist in the formulation of disaster management policies to help communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. However, direct social resilience measurement methods such as household surveys are not always a practical option as they are a time-and resource-exhaustive process. Existing measures mainly utilize publicly available census data, which often provide a poor and outdated assessment of current social resilience status. Another limitation includes a failure to capture multiple facets of indicators that are process-oriented and dynamic in nature such as mobility of people. These challenges can be addressed by employing a surrogate approach. Surrogates are alternative measures to depict the target indicator. The surrogate approach can capture key facets of a target indicator, which can be used as potential measures for the target indicator. A framework to conceptualize the surrogate approach is presented, and operationalized using a case study approach on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka to identify surrogates to measure mobility of people as a resilience indicator. Six higher-order themes were identi-fied as potential surrogates to measure mobility of people in a disaster context. The approach proposed to methodically identify potential surrogates and their measurement protocols can help to improve the current knowledge base and understanding of complex interrelationships of social resilience.