Community Resilience: Toward a Framework for an Integrated, Interdisciplinary Model of Disaster

Abstract

The science of resilience presents the opportunity to explain how natural, social, and physical systems interact to impact community functioning and well-being postdisaster. This paper describes the development and theoretical foundation of a comprehensive conceptual model, presenting a shift from the usual thinking about resilience to construe resilience more precisely as the trajectory of postdisaster recovery, with community functioning and well-being as the outcome of interest. Unique contributions of the results include the identification of the natural, social, and physical systems that are implicated in disasters, and the dynamic nature and directionality of how these elements relate in the context of hazards. The model represents the integrated and interdependent nature of the natural, social, and technical systems that influence community functioning, and resistance to and recovery from disasters. We argue that an integrated and interdependent model of community resilience can benefit scholars building theories of disaster and policymakers who need a guide for navigating the complex disaster environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the model is used in practice.