Where’s the community in community resilience? A post-earthquake study in Kaikōura, Aotearoa New Zealand

Theories about what communities are have been constantly evolving in response to considerations about the complex and multi-faceted processes that shape them. While this has led to conceptual refinement in some areas of research, debates about the nature of community are often overlooked when the term is paired with other concepts such as resilience. In such pairings, more discussion is evident over the meaning of resilience than the nature of community. Studies that focus on the resilience of a community risk neglecting the complex dynamics that shape them and, as a consequence, tend to underestimate how these processes influence resilience. Framed by Paton’s (2006) model of adaptive capacity, in this paper we argue that a more nuanced understanding of community which acknowledges the web of formal and informal relationships is required. These relationships give rise to “collectives” which, in turn, are integral to a community’s resilience because they bridge the gap between the individual and “the” community. This paper uses qualitative methods to examine collectives in Kaikōura, Aotearoa New Zealand following a Mw7. 8 earthquake to further our understanding of what is meant by community in community resilience. By examining the meso/collective level, rather than the micro/individual or macro/community level of community, a more nuanced understanding of community resilience emerges.