collaboration and community resilience

Community and Economic Development in North Carolina and Beyond A UNC School of Government Blog https://ced.sog.unc.edu ...

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Community and Economic Development in North Carolina and Beyond A UNC School of Government Blog https://ced.sog.unc.edu

Collaboration and Community Resilience Author : Rick Morse Categories : Community Development, Regional & Collaborative Approaches, Social & Civic Assets, Sustainable Development Tagged as : adaptive governance, Chapel Hill 2020, citizen engagement, collaborative governance, Collaborative Leadership, community resilience, Jordan Lake Partnership, lynchburg, regional collaboration Date : December 11, 2012

In the wake of the recent mega-storm Sandy, we hear a lot of discussion about “community resilience.” RAND Corporation defines community resilience as “the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations.” Hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires are certainly all examples of adverse situations communities may face. But natural disasters aren’t the only kind of adverse situations communities may want to be resilient in the face of. Public health problems like obesity, persistent poverty, and water pollution (for example) are likewise adverse situations. In other words, all communities should be thinking about resilience, whether the likelihood of a large-scale disaster is great or not.

Judith Innes and David Booher, in their excellent book Planning with Complexity (Routledge, 2010) note that resilient communities build capacity for learning and adaptation to change. Resilient communities are marked by adaptive governance systems that include the following components: 1) Diversity and interdependence: “diversity provides the many faceted perspectives, and interdependence creates the opportunity for the invention of options for mutual gain.” Copyright © 2009 to present School of Government at the University of North Carolina. All rights reserved. This blog post is published and posted online by the School of Government to address issues of interest to government officials. This blog post is for educational and informational use and may be used for those purposes without permission by providing acknowledgment of its source. Use of this blog post for commercial purposes is prohibited. To browse a complete catalog of School of Government publications, please visit the School’s website at www.sog.unc.edu or contact the Bookstore, School of Government, CB# 3330 Knapp-Sanders Building, UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3330; e-mail: [email protected]; telephone: 919.966.4119; or fax: 919.962.2707.

2) Collaborative dialogues: “they…build social capital…can create linkages…[and] can allow shared purpose to emerge.” 3) Collaborative development of knowledge: “different participants see through different lenses…such jointly developed information is essential to assuring trust.” 4)

Networks: “created and nurtured by public agencies…for joint tasks.”

5) Boundary spanning: “cross-sector, cross-jurisdictional, and cross-scale activities….enable resilience by creating new flows of information and by developing shared meaning among…actors.” 6) Monitoring and feedback: “there need to be ways of jointly analyzing…data and selecting appropriate responses.” 7) Small, diverse working groups: “a major component in…many…effective collaborative processes.” (pgs. 209-211) So the key to resilience is less about physical infrastructure (though certainly in communities at high-risk for natural disasters, infrastructure is very relevant). Rather, the key to community resilience is in cultivating adaptive governance systems, where actors across sectors are linked together by structures and processes that facilitate collaborative learning and action. So when communities like Lynchburg, Virginia invest in study circles about racism and racial equality, they are not only engaging citizens on an important local issue, they are building community resilience. When the Town of Chapel Hill engages citizens and other community stakeholders in a collaborative visioning effort, it is not only producing a comprehensive plan, it is building community resilience. When a dozen Triangle-area local governments come together to form the Jordan Lake Partnership to advance regional water supply planning, they are not only addressing important infrastructure issues, they are building adaptive governance capacity for the region, and hence, regional resilience. There are many great examples of building community and regional capacity for adaptive governance and resilience that often are not recognized as such. When local governments, development agencies, and other organizations engage stakeholders in collaboration, there are certainly short-term benefits (e.g., good ideas, buy-in, etc.). But the long-term benefits in terms of contributing to the development of community resilience are equally--if not more--important.

Copyright © 2009 to present School of Government at the University of North Carolina. All rights reserved. This blog post is published and posted online by the School of Government to address issues of interest to government officials. This blog post is for educational and informational use and may be used for those purposes without permission by providing acknowledgment of its source. Use of this blog post for commercial purposes is prohibited. To browse a complete catalog of School of Government publications, please visit the School’s website at www.sog.unc.edu or contact the Bookstore, School of Government, CB# 3330 Knapp-Sanders Building, UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3330; e-mail: [email protected]; telephone: 919.966.4119; or fax: 919.962.2707.

Copyright © 2009 to present School of Government at the University of North Carolina. All rights reserved. This blog post is published and posted online by the School of Government to address issues of interest to government officials. This blog post is for educational and informational use and may be used for those purposes without permission by providing acknowledgment of its source. Use of this blog post for commercial purposes is prohibited. To browse a complete catalog of School of Government publications, please visit the School’s website at www.sog.unc.edu or contact the Bookstore, School of Government, CB# 3330 Knapp-Sanders Building, UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3330; e-mail: [email protected]; telephone: 919.966.4119; or fax: 919.962.2707.

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