Vol.:(0123456789)
Natural Hazards (2021) 109:1097–1118londonessays.com
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The six capacities of community resilience: evidence from three small Texas communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey
Thomas W. Haase1 · Wen‑Jiun Wang1 · Ashley D. Ross2
Received: 19 November 2020 / Accepted: 10 June 2021 / Published online: 25 June 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021
AbstractThis article builds upon disaster scholarship that suggests community resilience is driven by six capacities: social, economic, physical, human, institutional, and environmental. Together, these capacities constitute a conceptual framework that can be used to investi-gate and assess community resilience. While recent scholarship has provided insights into how resilience operates in large communities, there remain questions about whether this conceptual framework is appropriate for the study of resilience in small communities. To narrow this knowledge gap, we conducted interviews with twenty-six subjects from three small Texas communities affected by Hurricane Harvey: City of Dickinson; City of Port Aransas; and Town of Refugio. Analysis of the interview data confirms that the six capaci-ties of resil
ience provide an appropriate framework for the investigation of resilience in small communities. Given the complex and dynamic nature of community resilience, the findings also suggest that it is unlikely policymakers will be able to develop a unified pol-icy solution for hazard events that is appropriate for all communities. Rather, policymak-ers need to consider community-based resilience solutions, driven by local strengths and weaknesses, that facilitate the reduction of risks associated with hazard events.
Keywords Community resilience · Hurricane Harvey · Rural · Natural hazard · Disaster response
1 Introduction
To reduce the risk and consequences of catastrophic hazard events, disaster management scholars have sought to define and conceptualize resilience (Comfort et al. 2010; Demiroz and Haase 2018), identify the capacities and processes related to resilience (Ross 2013), and specify how resilience can be operationalized and measured (Peacock et al. 2010; Cutter et al.
* Wen-Jiun Wang [email protected]
1 Department of Political Science, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77340, USA2 Department of Marine and Coastal Environmental Science, Texas A&M University at Galveston,
Galveston, TX 77553, USA