Table 2 Empirical insights about the role of social capital in resilience and implications for community resilience and climate change practice
From: Building community resilience in a context of climate change: The role of social capital
Theme | Empirical insights from social capital and resilience literature | Example literature | Implications for community resilience practice in the context of climate change |
|---|---|---|---|
Role of social capital in influencing community resilience | Bonding social capital enhances reactive resilience | Developing community resilience plans and actions that build bonding social capital is needed to help account for shocks to improve the role of social capital in enhancing reactive resilience | |
Bridging (including linking) social capital contributes to responsive resilience at the community level by providing access to new resources (e.g. physical and financial) but bonding social capital shapes whether and how action is undertaken | Smith et al. (2012b), Birhanu et al. (2017), and Bakker et al. (2019) | Building bridging social capital is important to create opportunities for accessing and including diverse perspectives, new resources and ideas for decision-making, improving collective capacity for understanding and adapting to changing circumstances to enhance responsive resilience | |
Perceptions of unequal access to resources can cause distrust and a loss of social capital and access to resources for future (responsive) resilience. Such losses within a community (e.g. between neighbours) may be buffered by norms of community support | Working with less visible subjective and normative dimensions of social capital is necessary to maintain flexibility to access different types of resources over time, supporting the role of social capital for enhancing responsive community resilience in the longer term | ||
Social capital can facilitate learning but what is learnt, by who and whether this informs future decisions is shaped by norms of inclusion/ exclusions, thus influencing the type of resilience | Barrett et al. (2011), Wickes et al. (2017), and Baehler and Biddle (2018) | Promoting norms of inclusion within decision-making spaces is essential to develop the role of social capital for understanding different needs and perspective to shape action to enhances responsive community resilience, e.g. to understand and engage with climate disadvantage and to shape positive community narratives | |
Factors that interact with social capital to influence resilience | Social capital is one of many other factors involved in shaping resilience | Considering the role of multiple factors and how these vary between settings is necessary when developing strategies, plans and actions for building resilience | |
Social capital connects in complex ways with other slow and fast changing factors to shape resilience. Feedbacks between slow-changing factors relating to human, cultural and social capital are particularly important | Kizos et al. (2014), Sinclair et al. (2014), and Guillotreau et al. (2017) | Working through the connections between social, human and cultural factors is important to shape how desirable futures are imagined and pursued, and identify transformative need and potential to shape proactive community resilience | |
Social capital is necessary but insufficient for shaping resilience, even in settings with high levels of social capital. But, social capital can be an effective strategy to develop or access hard-to-reach resources | Islam and Walkerden (2014), Jordan (2015), and Béné et al. (2016) | Creating enabling socio-political environments with diverse capacities and resources orientated towards supporting proactive community resilience is necessary to ensure a central role for social capital in building proactive community resilience in practice | |
Combinations of different types of social capital and other resources will vary in importance for shaping resilience across different social settings and objectives | Smith et al. (2012b), Skerratt (2013), and Oteng-Ababio et al. (2015) | Applying social capital approaches in practice needs to focus on working with combinations of factors, which influence how problems, solutions and desirable futures are imagined and the type of spaces that emerge for new ideas, understandings (e.g. positive narratives) and outcomes to emerge (e.g. address local needs while engaging with climate action including emissions reductions) | |
Social capital shifts as proximities, needs, routines and practices of actors shift, thus the role of social capital for resilience can also change over time | Vallance and Carlton (2015) , Blackman et al. (2016), Tilt and Gerkey (2016), and Peters (2019) | Finding ways for practitioners to support and strengthen bonding and bridging social capital as circumstances shift (e.g. during crises) is important for maintaining flexibility and the ability to work through vertical and horizontal connections to enhance community resilience in the longer term | |
Socio-cultural factors, e.g. norms of inclusions/ exclusion, sense of community and sustainable use of shared resources, facilitate collective agency to build community resilience | Smith et al. (2012a), Parés et al. (2018), Carrico et al. (2019), and Moreno et al. (2019) | Working with social capital approaches to enhance resilience must involve engaging with the underlying socio-cultural dimensions to identify and build on opportunities and needs to guide different resilience outcomes to help give rise to proactive types of community resilience | |
The influence of formal institutions in shaping the role of social capital for resilience | Decisions at higher levels of governance that shift the balance of power between actors can influence different actors’ practices and social capital (structural and norms of cooperation or competition) that shape resilience | Recognising and actively supporting all types of social capital by national policy makers is important to ensure high level decisions do not undermine, and instead help strengthen vertical and horizontal connections, to enable the flexibility for community actors to enhance all types of community resilience | |
Limited recognition of the importance of linking social capital can lead to missed opportunities for more coordinated collective action and further development of social capital for enhancing resilience | LaLone (2012), Morris et al. (2019), and Thompson and Lopez Barrera (2019) | Working through vertical connections is important to ensure local government interventions are designed to connect with local needs and capacities and build all types of social capital in implementation, enhancing the role of social capital in promoting resilience in the long term | |
Linking social capital can help create new opportunities to enhance social capital, e.g. through the creation of voluntary and transformational leadership programmes to enhance community resilience | Building and working through linking social capital helps create opportunities for developing and strengthening government supported interventions, including those aimed at enhancing the role of social capital to support resilience within communities. Enhance proactive community resilience however needs to involve opportunities for meaningful participation in decision-making, collective learning and for empowering forms of change | ||
Embedded institutional socio-cultural factors (discourses, attitudes and practices) can influence the access of social groups to different spaces and resources that shape resilience | Cox and Perry (2011), Oteng-Ababio et al. (2015), and Singer et al. (2015) | Engaging with and shaping government cultures, values and practices of these actors is critical to strengthening enabling policy environments to develop the role of social capital in building community resilience,, particularly for engaging with complex challenges including climate change |