The resilience contract: Comparing climate resilience planning and community realities in Dominica

Climate resilience plans are proliferating globally, yet whether the priorities they formalise align with what communities themselves are identifying as essential for resilience remains unclear. Dominica has pledged to become the world's first climate-resilient nation by 2030; its Climate Resilience and Recovery Plan (CRRP) was produced following Category 5 Hurricane Maria in 2017, which resulted in losses of approximately 226% of GDP ( The Government of the Commonwealth of Dominica, 2017 ). We compare the resilience framings embedded in the CRRP with those emerging from 101 interviews carried out across Dominica in 2024. We identify strong community networks and social capital as strengths while economic insecurity, limited access to finance, and inconsistent institutional enforcement emerge as persistent weaknesses. Six components interviewees identified as central to resilience – faith, flexibility, family, activism, disaster aid, and evacuation – did not emerge as distinct components in our coding of the CRRP's 56 national initiatives. Drawing on state legibility and adaptation social contract theory, we introduce the resilience contract: the perceived arrangement through which actors understand what resilience requires, who is responsible for producing it, and how well those responsibilities are perceived to be fulfilled in practice. We describe these unrepresented components as being policy-imperceptible – their significance in lived accounts is not translated into a formal policy commitment. Monitoring frameworks that rely solely on policy-perceptible indicators may misrepresent how communities actually survive. Our method of separately deriving and comparing policy and lived resilience components provides a replicable approach for identifying structural gaps in resilience plans.