Understandings and applications of rural community resilience amongst Scottish stakeholders: Introducing dual discourses

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to examine understandings and applications of rural community resilience. Scottish policy has shifted toward neoliberalism and community empowerment, with communities encouraged to play a proactive role in enhancing their own resilience. We argue that it is important to understand the perspectives of multiple stakeholders to identify what practical factors they believe enhance community resilience and to provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms through which community resilience can be delivered. Drawing on qualitative data collection, we question what resilience means and what factors can facilitate it in practice. We find that dual discourses of resilience emerge: the emergency which reflects the policy focus on short-term damage reduction, and the everyday which reflects the desire for more long-term adaptive capacities developing in response to gradual change in rural communities. We conclude that the discourse which stakeholders align with will affect how they understand, adopt, and practice the concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural community resilience
• multiple perspectives
• stakeholders
• community empowerment
• scotland
• dual discourses

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful for the time, insights, and experiences shared by all our research participants, and for the advice and comments of those who reviewed earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Local Assets, Local Decisions and Community Resilience” project funded by the Scottish Government’s 2016–2022 Strategic Research Programme.

Additional information

Funding

The research supporting this paper was funded by the Rural & Environment Science & Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government, as part of the Communities and Wellbeing Work Package of the 2016–2022 Strategic Research Program; Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division.