Exploring tools and processes for resilience learning: How can joined-up learning influence effective policy processes? Jennifer Williams Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience, University of Dundee. Contact: jswilliams@dundee.ac.uk Funded by: ESRC and The Scottish Government Resilience Division
Background: How we are dealing with uncertainty is changing As the recognition that protecting communities is an innumerable challenge and one that cannot be managed by one agency alone, so too grows the recognition such complex challenges can be managed more effectively through greater involvement in the policy process, enabling communities to play a more significant role in developing community resilience (Berkes and Ross, 2012). As a result of this, a number of community resilience interventions have been developed by the Scottish Government Resilience Division (SGRD) jointly with a variety of actors and agencies at multi-level scales such as policy makers, practitioners and community councillors . Whilst this involvement in the policy making processes demonstrates that such policy interventions are a product of complex interactions between various actors and can be deemed as progressive, there are still however significant challenges to the implementation of community resilience interventions:
Problem Context:
Hierarchical relationships within the implementation phase and lack of feedback mechanism for knowledge exchange within the evaluation phase.
Opportunity Context: New thinking for a new climate
Existing joined-up working already exists across stakeholder groups at different levels (albeit largely in revolt of hazards), which indicates a position of familiarity for stakeholder groups to join together to better understand future challenges Joined-up learning can better develop a practical response in advance of hazards leading to more inclusive and informed joined-up working, and improved policy outcomes and use of resources Whilst there is a recognised lack of tools and understanding of processes which embrace complex risks and uncertainties (Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2014), the SGRD are keen to develop support to enable the community as a stakeholder group to move forward as engaged actors of a process, rather than recipients of a product, and ‘in spite of imperfect knowledge’ (Tschakert and Dietrich 2010)
This research acknowledges that how we are dealing with uncertainty is changing, but how we are proactively learning about uncertainty needs to improve where new thinking for a new climate needs to be embraced. In doing so it recognises that new thinking requires a transformation of current policy processes to one which includes feedback mechanisms.
Most joined-up working occurs in revolt of a hazard (i.e. Community Emergency Planning) Community Resilience initiatives are on the increase with mixed response rates, but there is not yet any guidance which tells us what is working and what is not working, information is piecemeal There is a growing appetite for understanding what works across stakeholder groups (community groups knowing about other community groups, policy makers understanding about restrictions), however there is no space or process (feedback mechanism) to feed information into the policy process to further improve community resilience initiatives
Research Aim: This research therefore aims to understand how joined-up learning can be achieved to improve policy processes around community resilience. The first part of this research will investigate how stakeholder groups use current tools and processes to learn and share on community resilience. The second part of this research will then explore how this information can be designed into a more coherent and robust community based toolkit such as a self-assessment for use at the community level. Research Objectives: 1. What is the current landscape of stakeholders involved in community resilience and how is it changing? 2. 2. What information do stakeholder groups understand as important to learn and share 3. What are the current tools and processes used for learning and sharing about community resilience by stakeholder groups, and how useful are existing tools in assessing and disseminating learning? 4. Through testing and designing a new community based tool kit how can these be improved to impact on the policy process?
Fig 1. Shows example of Community Emergency Plans which have been increasingly implemented since 2011 across Scotland. Community Councils were responsible for implementing further into the community, which received a mixed response in take-up and overall success of the interventions. Fig 2. Demonstrates the opportunity that a feedback tool at a community level could inform other stakeholder groups as well as future community resilience interventions
Fig 1
Fig 2
Methods: This research focuses on creating more inclusive practices and structures to enable joined-up learning across multiple levels of stakeholder groups into the policy process. In doing so it takes a novel approach to the methods where it is intensely qualitative and shaped to be as inductive as possible: