| dc.description.abstract | Communities are taking action to address different types of change and shape their own future to enable a desirable state. Yet a critical understanding of the relationship between collective action and community resilience is not fully elaborated. This thesis enriches community resilience research by examining attributes of community and how the attributes interact with collective action to promote three constituent components of community resilience: that is specific resilience, general resilience, and transformative capacity, defined here as ability to envisage and plan for the future. This study undertakes research in Wadebridge, north Cornwall, UK, and Sedgefield, western Cape, South Africa. These coastal towns represent emerging complexities of change, both with a history of collective action and communities fragmented by identity and demographic divisions. Focus groups, semi-structured key informant interviews and participatory scenario planning are used to elicit different resident perspectives on community and ability to promote specific and general resilience and transformative capacity. The results suggest four key attributes of community: resident identity, trust, interests around collective action and differential ability and power to affect change. Incomers, who are a particular type of lifestyle migrant, act as catalysts promoting collective action for specific resilience, which builds capacity for incomers to address known hazards. But there is significant difference between incomers and other resident groupings that reinforces social divisions. Collective action that enables general resilience reconfigures to bring distinct residents together to share resources and build trust, allowing more residents to positively address different shocks and disturbances and provide an entry point to negotiate the future. Residents understand transformative capacity also requires fundamentally changing social structures, power relations and identity-related roles. The implications of the results are that incorporating the influence of lifestyle mobility into community resilience research increases explanation of the way in which communities are being reshaped and the role of individuals in promoting collective action for different constituent components of community resilience. Collective action conferring general resilience is shaped by individual capacity and networks, rather than collective capacity, with individuals interlinking responses to specific and general resilience together. | en_GB |
