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dc.contributor.advisorLujala, Päivi
dc.contributor.advisorSetten, Gunhild
dc.contributor.authorScherzer, Sabrina
dc.date.accessioned2021-09-30T09:09:00Z
dc.date.available2021-09-30T09:09:00Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.identifier.isbn978-82-326-6425-2
dc.identifier.issn2703-8084
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/11250/2786509
dc.description.abstractAs part of the now-concluded project ‘Climate Change and Natural Hazards: The Geography of Community Resilience in Norway’ (ClimRes), this PhD research set out to investigate how resilient Norwegian communities are to natural hazards. Using primarily quantitative methods, it contributed to the following two project objectives: (1) to identify key dimensions and measurable indicators of community resilience, and (2) to explore perceptions of community resilience (and related concepts). In order to address both of these objectives, which served as guide and framing for the PhD research, two methodological approaches were chosen: (1) the construction of an index based on publicly available data, and (2) the development of a survey instrument on community resilience and subsequent quantitative analysis of the survey data. The PhD project resulted in four articles (three of them published, one recently submitted), and one unpublished conference paper. As a whole, the doctoral thesis presented hereafter comprises two parts. The first part provides an introduction to resilience in disaster research, outlines research design and output, and presents overall contributions and conclusions. The second part contains the four articles and the conference paper. Each article investigates a different aspect of community resilience, either explicitly or implicitly. Articles 1 and 2 use the same dataset based on publicly available data. Article 1 presents the first community resilience index for Norway through the adaptation of an existing resilience assessment framework. Article 2, employing a clustering technique, identifies meaningful groups of Norwegian municipalities that share certain sets of resilience characteristics. The conference paper, Articles 3 and 4 use different subsets of the survey data. The conference paper takes a look at how different factors influence people’s perceptions of community resilience. Due to statistical and conceptual issues, it was not turned into a full length article but instead served as an important lesson learnt during the research process. Article 3, instead, examines how different factors influence people’s feelings of safety, feelings of preparedness, and actual preparatory behaviour with regard to natural hazard events. Perceived community resilience, in terms of social, economic, human, and physical capital, is used as an explanatory variable in the analysis. Finally, Article 4, explores one aspect of community resilience that, though essential, is often overlooked and neglected, i.e. the community. Community may be the unit of analysis in most, if not all, community resilience research, but it hardly ever receives sufficient attention. Hence, Article 4 investigates people’s understandings of community and contrasts them with scholarly and policy conceptions. One conclusion of this PhD research is that it is a very challenging endeavour to assess levels of community resilience. Since community resilience is an ambiguous and hotly contested concept, there simply is little agreement on what it is, which components it entails, and how it should be assessed. The assessment approach, whichever one chooses, always reflects personal interpretations of the concept and thus invites critique. If, however, critique and shortcomings are set aside for a moment, it is possible to draw some conclusions about the geography of community resilience in Norway. Both Articles 1 and 2 point toward a north south divide, with many more resilient municipalities in the south of the country and many less resilient municipalities in the north. Moreover, the urban and semi-urban municipalities generally fare better in terms of overall resilience. However, with regard to the rural municipalities, the picture is more diverse, ranging from the lowest to some of the highest 1 scorers. In any case, it is advisable to perform an in-depth analysis of indicator and sub-index scores before drawing any conclusions about the levels of resilience of individual municipalities or groups of municipalities. As to people’s perceptions of community resilience, preparedness, and safety with regard to natural hazards (based on Article 3 and the conference paper), it is fair to say that the majority of the survey respondents are not, or little, concerned about natural hazard events. They feel safe in their natural hazard environments and have mostly positive perceptions of their communities. However, with respect to natural hazard preparedness, about half of the respondents feel little or not at all prepared to deal with the consequences of natural hazard events, and less than a quarter have taken conscious actions to prepare. The analysis in Article 3 indicates that feelings of safety, fostered by competences at the household level, positive perceptions of the community, and trust in institutions, impede preparatory action. In contrast, perceived exposure to and experience with natural hazards may motivate preparatory behaviour as well as foster feelings of preparedness. Yet if the latter, i.e. feeling better prepared, is not accompanied by any conscious action to prepare, it could also be understood as speaking to people’s confidence or possibly overconfidence in their abilities to handle a crisis. If people are indeed overconfident because they trust the system and place the responsibility to prepare elsewhere, then actual preparedness levels may be diminished. With respect to Article 4, the survey respondents used a myriad of ways to describe community. Most frequently, their understandings were linked to places or areas, and slightly less than half included people. Strikingly, however, less than ten percent included explicit references to relational aspects. The social relational fabric is now commonly seen as a key attribute of community and a prerequisite for community-based programmes, such as community resilience programmes, but in the minds of the respondents, it seems the relational was less prevalent. Overall, the thesis contributes to the growing body of knowledge on community resilience in the context of disaster research. As its focus lies on community resilience to natural hazards in Norway, it also speaks to the emerging Norwegian community resilience literature as well as to the literature on natural hazard preparedness. Moreover, through the individual articles, it contributes to social indicator research, to research on risk perception and preparedness, as well as to community research.en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherNTNUen_US
dc.relation.ispartofseriesDoctoral theses at NTNU;2021:175
dc.titleStrength in Numbers: Community Resilience to Natural Hazards in Norwayen_US
dc.typeDoctoral thesisen_US
dc.subject.nsiVDP::Samfunnsvitenskap: 200::Samfunnsgeografi: 290en_US
dc.description.localcodeDigital fulltext not availableen_US


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