Overview
Effective Building Community Resilience is an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, and cross-sector effort to foster resilience in local communities, organizations, governments, and societies overcome by security challenges such as terrorism and catastrophic disasters. It incorporates both theoretical and practical components in advancing its core objectives.homeland security depends on policymakers’ ability to weave a blanket of protection from a number of public sector threads: law enforcement, intelligence, the military, emergency management and public health. Complete coverage requires weaving in the private sector and an active citizenry. Considering the unpredictability of man-made threats and the variation in natural threats around the nation, current thinking is that we need to knit the sectors together from the bottom up. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) calls this a Whole of Community approach. The White House refers to this as an all-of-nation approach. The policy push is evident in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, which identified fostering community resilience to disasters as one of its five mission areas. Shifting the nation’s focus to building community resilience brings new challenges.
Research Agenda
INSCT's contribution to the theoretical discussion of community
resilience emanates from addressing the challenge of identifying the way
in which resilient systems are understood across multiple disciplines
(social sciences, engineering, biology) in a policy context. Our
researchers have concluded that a community’s resilience is a function
of its resource robustness and adaptive capacity, a concept that is more
fully explained in Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary
Framework for Assessment. INSCT researchers continue to advance this
study in order to operationalize the conceptual framework. Current
efforts also focus on in-depth case studies of communities that have
experienced and bounced back from catastrophic events.
Current Research
I. Fostering individual resilience - In collaboration with the Campbell Institute, Maxwell School Citizenship and Public Affairs, INSCT is studying individuals’ and families’ understanding of their responsibilities in the event of a community-disrupting event;
II. Enhancing regional resilience – INSCT researchers are analyzing intrastate mutual aid systems and compacts in all 50 states to assess the state-of-play and identify best practices.
III. Assessing critical infrastructure resilience –Syracuse University researchers conducted a comparative validation study of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sponsored Critical Infrastructure Protection Decision Support System (CIPDSS) to offer an interdisciplinary and systems-level understanding of resilience. The results were reported in “Baton Rouge Post-Katrina: The Role of Critical Infrastructure Modeling in Promoting Resilience”;
IV. Developing an analytical framework for assessing community resilience - INSCT researchers are focused on identifying the way in which resilient systems are understood across multiple disciplines (social sciences, engineering, biology) in a policy context.
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