Culturally constituted understandings of community resilience to natural disasters and their implications for communication campaigns

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