SYMP 10-1 - Resilience justice: The intersection of resilience science, social justice, policy analysis, and community capacities

Wednesday, August 14, 2019: 1:30 PM
Ballroom E, Kentucky International Convention Center
Tony Arnold, School of Law, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY; Department of Urban & Public Affairs, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY
Background/Question/Methods:

Marginalized communities (e.g., low-income communities of color, indigenous communities) are disproportionately vulnerable to disturbances and systemic changes (e.g., climate change, drought, flood, urban heat, pollution crises), the result of systemic inequalities created and reinforced by interconnected social, environmental, and institutional systems. These communities have impoverished capacities to resist, bounce back from, adapt to, and transform through disturbances and changes. Consider Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, Flint’s drinking-water crisis, interconnected park and health disparities in Los Angeles, and many urban areas characterized by degraded waterways, exposure to pollution, and heat island effects, among others. Neither paternalistic policies or community self-sufficiency is adequate to address these injustices in adaptive capacities. Existing concepts like environmental justice, disaster justice, and climate justice are too narrow in scope. There is a need for a new concept and framework for analyzing marginalized communities’ capacities in the context of the social, environmental, and governance systems in which they are embedded.

Results/Conclusions:

Resilience justice is both a new concept and a new analytical framework for assessing relative vulnerability and resilience in marginalized communities, identifying the factors affecting a community’s adaptive capacities, and developing both proposed governance reforms and community capacity-building methods that will help to build the community’s resilience. Resilience justice requires an integration of policy and governance reforms, resilience-enabling conditions in marginalized communities (especially environmental conditions such as green and blue infrastructure, but also social capital, economic investment, and political engagement and inclusion), and community empowerment and capacity-building. This transdisciplinary concept brings together resilience science and social justice, based on syntheses of over 300 studies of factors affecting community resilience and vulnerability. This presentation will describe resilience justice as both a concept and analytical framework and its theoretical foundations. The presentation will also describe six major resilience assessments undertaken by the interdisciplinary Resilience Justice Project at the University of Louisville Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility, analyzing the resilience and vulnerabilities of low-income neighborhoods of color in both California and Kentucky in partnership with government agencies and community-based groups, and identifying key governance and community reforms to improve adaptive capacities and justice.