An entire wiki too much to digest? Check out these ten resources to get a sense for the field:
This regional strategy document from New Zealand is globally recognised for its leadership in being among the first of its kind to integrate psychological and social dimensions into disaster management and community resilience planning. Published in 2012 but still a helpful benchmark for a sector that still largely lags behind.
Of the 41+ initiatives that are being championed by the UN’s Race to Resilience campaign, only two so far focus on the psycho-social dimension. One of these is the COP^2 Network - 460+ organizations working to strengthen our collective ability to endure and adapt to the climate crisis. Spearheaded by the Billion Minds Institute, this network has produced a report and an incubator programme to prototype and scale approaches to psychological resilience in the context of climate change. It has a primary focus on resilience at an individual level, but its theory of change and project pipeline also integrate community and societal levels.
This web article by Bob Doppelt, the founder of the International Transformational Resilience Network, describes why the UN’s Race to Resilience campaign is expanding to include psycho-social resilience in communities.
Published through an academic article in 2013, the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit is a community intervention that brings stakeholders together to address community issues through assessment, group processes, planning, and action. The toolkit addresses four main domains: Connection and caring; Resources; Transformative potential (including inner skills); and Disaster management.
This 2020 academic literature review primarily aims to broaden the view of mental health scholars and practitioners to consider resilience in a more systemic light and develop “understanding of the multiple, interacting systems that facilitate the mental health of individuals challenged by atypical stress.” The paper explores how resilience depends on a range of biological, psychological, social, and ecological systems interacting, and so is also relevant to those considering how individual resilience contributes to societal resilience.
This 2024 academic literature review of community resilience describes the subject as a ‘boundary object’ - a concept that doesn’t sit squarely within one discipline but is functionally vague enough to be shared by many disciplines for the purpose of transdisciplinary collaboration and sense-making. The paper discusses definitions, government/NGO strategies and what they cover. Although it does discuss the importance of social capital, in common with the vast majority of literature on the subject of societal/social/community resilience, the article’s primary focus is on structural and material aspects. It provides good context for this work none-the-less.
This review of empirical findings looks at the role of social capital in resilience, and implications for community resilience and climate change practice. It underscores the importance of social capital for community resilience, while showing the complex ways they can interact.
This 2020 paper challenges the limited scope of how the psycho-social dimensions of societal/social/community resilience are considered. It draws on the research into social identity theory, which can offer insights into the dynamic nature of intra- and inter-group behaviour. The authors challenge policies that limit or do not recognise the capacity of people to express solidarity and to organise themselves.