External Interventions for Enhancing Community Resilience: An Overview of Planning Paradigms

In any disaster context development may appear as adaptation through adopting mitigation measures for enhancing community resilience. Though the popular discourse of development always includes economic growth, in the context of resilience, this ‘development’ merges with the process of adaptation. But the planning process of conducting this ‘development’ as well as ‘adaptation’ requires more concerns while the process is intervened by external bodies, like governmental, non-governmental and donor organizations. This chapter provides an overview of planning paradigms for enhancing community resilience in a given political and ecological context, based on existing literature. The ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’ literature primarily express concerns for enhancing resilience through infrastructure-based engineered solutions and alterations of natural surroundings mostly in the top-down manner. The involvements of externals as well as professionals usually follow the rational planning paradigm that asks experts to select the ‘best’ solution, identifying and defining the problem, fixing goals and objectives, preparing lists of all possible options to solve the problem, evaluating possible consequences of every option. For ensuring the involvement of local communities, the professional-oriented top-down rational planning approach can be replaced by its opposite: bottom-up planning approach which is time consuming, expensive and simple rhetoric and quite impossible to apply in cases where external bodies are involved for development. The post positivist planning paradigm may support the ideas of active and incremental participation of community members within the structure of rational top-down approach through the lens of political ecology which has been developed as an interdisciplinary approach to investigate complex human environment interactions, especially those related to economic development of the third world.