‘Pieces of kit’ are not enough: the role of infrastructure in community resilience

Abstract

Flood resilience is about the ability of people and places to cope with, recover from and adapt to flooding in ways that maintain quality of life and identities. In the past UK flood risk management prioritised engineering solutions to prevent flooding (barriers, walls, etc); today there is greater emphasis on resilience. Cutter et al (2010) developed a model that describes community resilience capacities/resources in terms of social, institutional, infrastructure and economic resilience along with community capital. This paper draws on the findings of an evaluation of thirteen flood resilience community ‘pathfinder’ projects run in England between 2013 – 2015, which aimed to enable and stimulate communities to develop innovative local solutions and improve resilience to flooding. Actions to improve flood infrastructure included installing property resilience measures or setting up community flood stores providing equipment to deal with emergencies. The paper explores the way that ‘infrastructure resilience capacities’ were developed and examines how physical infrastructure contributed to community flood resilience. It finds that the development of infrastructure resilience depends on strong relations between community members (‘community capital’) as well as relationships between community organisations and flood management institutions (‘institutional resilience’). The conclusions discuss the implications for infrastructure schemes in other places.