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Community Resilience in Southern Appalachia: A Theoretical Framework and Three Case Studies

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Abstract

A fundamental assumption in nearly all research on social adaptation to environmental change is that there is a concomitant and inverse relationship between human communities’ dependence upon particular natural resources affected by environmental change and those communities or societies’ resilience to disturbances. However, recent theoretical and empirical developments suggest resilience is a dynamic social process determined, in part, by the ability of communities to act collectively and solve common problems. The interactional approach to community is utilized to develop a framework whereby various patterns of social interaction define the process of social resilience. Data come from multiple mixed methods case studies of forest dependent communities within Southern Appalachia. The findings reveal varied processes of social resilience can occur in communities with similar levels of resource dependence; a community’s composition of internal social ties and their cross-scale linkages to external agencies and organizations define these processes.

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Notes

  1. However, the theory’s applicability to social systems has been called into question (Davidson 2010; Wilbanks and Kates 2010).

  2. This data is publically available from 1977 to 2008 from the US Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns datasets.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a doctoral dissertation improvement grant from the National Science Foundation (Award No. 1030395) and a Hoffmann Fellowship from the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University. The authors would like to thank Dr. Ed Kick, Dr. Hugh Devine, and Hollie Smith for their comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Jordan W. Smith

  2. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Roger L. Moore, Dorothy H. Anderson & Christos Siderelis

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  1. Jordan W. Smith
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Correspondence to Jordan W. Smith.

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Smith, J.W., Moore, R.L., Anderson, D.H. et al. Community Resilience in Southern Appalachia: A Theoretical Framework and Three Case Studies. Hum Ecol 40, 341–353 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9470-y

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