Organisational Resilience to Compound Events: Wildfire and the COVID‐19 Pandemic in the Sierra Nevada Region of California

ABSTRACT The years 2020 and 2021 mark the two largest wildfire seasons in recorded California state history and the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article employs the resilience as meta‐capability framework in the study of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) response to and recovery from these compound events in the Sierra Nevada region of California, with three aims. The first is to advance understanding of organisational resilience to compound events. The second is to motivate a theoretically informed body of work that moves SME climate‐related impact studies beyond empirical description of outcomes and towards understanding of how resilient organisations might be built. The third is to support increased SME resilience through the identification and dissemination of the key capabilities and conditions that enabled response and recovery. Findings, based on semi‐structured interviews with 32 Sierra Nevada SMEs, suggest that the resilience as meta‐capability framework is helpful towards achieving those ends.