Community resilience, social capital and territorial governance

Abstract

The community resilience constitutes a conceptual framework for understanding the risks and changes that rural regions face. Nevertheless different paradigms and disciplines have influenced its development in particular directions. Along the way, what was initially formulated in the natural sciences has come to be embraced enthusiastically by the social sciences and harnessed to already contested concepts, such as community and social capital, as a way of explicating what should be resilient, the conditions and resources thought to foster resilience, and the ways in which resilience can be measured. But this has not occurred unproblematically and there are reasons to be cautious about the uncritical application of resilience thinking to social systems and contexts. Further, while the interest of this collection lies in the concept of rural community resilience, it is important to be mindful that there is nothing uniquely rural about the term since it has also been adopted in the urban context, arguably with even more fervour. It is worth asking, then, what, if anything, is distinct about the theory, policy and practice of rural community resilience and in what ways do rural studies scholars make a contribution to resilience debates that go beyond the immediate setting of rural spaces.