Abstract:
This paper explores how cultural factors determine how community resilience is understood
in different national contexts and the implications this has for communication campaigns
designed to build community resilience to natural disasters. Community resilience has
become a popular topic of research and theorising across many disciplines. Building
community resilience involves developing skills and knowledge in communities to enable
adaptive capacity in the face of disturbance and change caused by sometimes life
threatening events such as natural disasters. It is especially in the areas of disaster and crisis
management that there are opportunities to explore the contribution that communication
and public relations practitioners can make to building community resilience. To date,
however, the concept of community resilience has not been widely explored in public
relations scholarship. Furthermore, most resilience literature is grounded in Western and
Eurocentric values which fail to reflect on the values of other cultures - especially Eastern
cultures. Based on 50 interviews with disaster management communication experts in Sri Lanka and
New Zealand this research demonstrates how economic, spiritual, religious, social, cultural
and national biases all influence how communities constitute what resilience means, and
how they can build resilience against the often catastrophic impacts of natural disasters
such as floods and earthquakes. The research findings provide pivotal insights for those
working in crisis and disaster management in terms of how and what they need to take into
account when communicating with audiences in terms of appropriate attitudes and
behaviours to adopt for developing resilience
