Fostering community resilience in the aftermath of a disaster constitutes a significant challenge and requires an adequate understanding of the community’s specific capabilities and vulnerabilities. We carried out a field study in Nepal as a multi-disciplinary research team that explored how the humanitarian response enabled community resilience after the devastating earthquakes. We explored three elements of resilience: persistence, adaptability and transformability by zooming in and out between the local community and humanitarian organizations operating at the national level. Our combined insights from three disciplines, social sciences, information management and logistics, show that humanitarian organizations operating in Nepal still primarily aimed to (re)build community resilience ‘from above’ instead of enabling communities to strengthen their own resilience in a bottom up way. In this paper we contend that fostering an inclusive and networked response has the potential to strengthen the adaptive capacity of humanitarian organizations and community groups and boost local resilience.
History
Conference proceeding
ISCRAM 2016 Conference Proceedings
Name of event
13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Event start date
2016-05-22
Event finish date
2016-05-25
Language
other
Legacy posted date
2020-08-25
Legacy Faculty/School/Department
ARCHIVED Faculty of Science & Technology (until September 2018)