Community Resilience: Do Differences in COVID-Induced Regional Economic Impacts Draw Different Community Initiatives in Response? A Thematic Analysis

COVID-19 affected every part of Australia - disrupting businesses and livelihoods, creating uncertainty for communities. This paper examined how COVID-19 impacted Cairns and Townsville with the specific aim to explore the proposition that, for similar levels of base-line resilience within a community, the number and type of community-based initiatives generated for the two tropical cities were directly related to the impact of this disruptive pandemic. This research employed a thematic analysis to examine community-based initiatives mentioned in articles published in: The Cairns Post and The Townsville Bulletin, for the year 2020. It also implemented a deductive approach in aligning these initiatives to community resilience capacities (viz. absorption, adaptive, and restorative capacities), leading to an interpretive and comparative understanding of the responses of the Cairns and Townville communities to COVID-19.

Results indicated Cairns and Townsville were impacted differently by COVID-19 and responses varied accordingly. Firstly, more initiatives were generated in Cairns, likely due to its strong reliance on tourism and related sectors, which were severely affected by COVID-19, upsetting Cairns’ economy more than Townsville. Secondly, different types of initiatives were observed in the two cities, which focused on different capacities of community resilience. Initiatives in Cairns reinforced the community’s restorative capacity while Townsville, had no restorative initiatives and focused on strengthening absorption and adaptive capacities due to less severe impact of COVID-19. This supports the initial proposition that the number and type of community-based initiatives varies with the severity of the disruption and can therefore be used as an indicator of the severity of the disruption. Cairns and Townsville both developed various social and community initiatives to cushion the effects of COVID-19 which demonstrate their ingenuity and resilience. The initiatives provide a silver lining to the pandemic and should help in long-term sustainable recovery of Cairns and Townsville as regional cities servicing Tropical North Queensland.