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1. Connecting Collective Memory and Community Resilience: A Case Study of Anaconda, Montana

   Megan Moore; Elizabeth Covelli Metcalf; Alexander Metcalf (September 2023, Journal of rural and community development)

   Post-industrial communities across the world are transitioning from industrial economies and identities to an uncertain future. Their successful transitions depend on communities’ abilities to navigate change and maintain a quality of life, or their community’s resilience. Previous scholarship offers resources and capabilities that facilitate or inhibit community resilience such as leadership, social capital, and information. However, collective memory is not well integrated within the community resilience literature. Drawing on data from interviews with 33 community leaders in the town of Anaconda, Montana, we illuminate the impact of collective memory on community resilience. The Anaconda Smelter Stack stands out as a specific landmark and prominent feature of the built environment that perpetuates particular collective memories in Anaconda. We find that collective memory is an integral part of community resilience, where memories can aid in a community’s recovery and rebuilding or constrain thinking and divide viewpoints. We argue that ignoring collective memory’s connections to resilience can undermine efforts to face changes in these communities. 

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2. A sustainability framework based on threats, consequences, and solutions (TCS) for managing watershed commons

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295228  

   Camarillo, Ana Lorena; Randhir, Timothy O. (December 2023, PLOS ONE)

   Bhadauria, Tunira (Ed.)

   Sustainable management of common pool resources requires local information and participation. We develop a framework for managing commons based on threats, consequences, and solutions (TCS). The status of the community’s interaction with their local commons is critical in developing viable solutions to avoiding the loss of natural resources, enhancing the benefits they provide, and sustaining the functions they perform. Threats to natural resources, the consequences of their depletion, and the solutions local communities perceive as most effective to prevent this loss are assessed as related to socioeconomic and landscape factors to develop strategies for the resilience of commons. Communities and representative stakeholders (224 respondents) participated in a survey in Honduras’s Lake Yojoa watershed. The community’s perception was also evaluated for impacts of changes in land use and climate on local commons. An ordinal logistic regression analysis was used to determine the effect of land use, geographic, and demographic factors on community perceptions. Distance to the lake, landcover percentages, slope, type of work, age, and importance of tourism were significant in influencing community interaction and perception of TCS. The involvement of communities in deriving knowledge on TCS is critical to increasing the resilience of local commons to emerging threats. 

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3. Exploring diverse perspectives of coastal resilience: The state of resilience model

   https://doi.org/10.34237/1009043  

   Szczyrba, Laura; Shawler, Justin; Rezaie, Ali Mohammed; Constant, Vanessa (December 2022, Shore & Beach)

   In the context of climate change, the term resilience was popularized by the field of ecology to describe how ecological systems respond to stress and has since been adopted and significantly adapted by various fields, including psychology, policy, urban planning, and engineering. The exact meaning of resilience has blurred over time. In the context of coastal hazards, “resilience” is a holistic idea that relates long and short-term physical hazards with societal and biological impacts and mitigation measures. However, applying this idea to community-based mitigation planning remains challenging due to: (1) the diverse meanings, perspectives, and applications of the term, (2) the tendency of the term to defer to the status quo, thereby neglecting the voices of historically marginalized populations, and (3) the non-participatory and quantitative nature of resilience studies, often depending on cost-benefit analyses. In this paper, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners develops and proposes a new conceptual model for coastal resilience that offers to help address these aforementioned challenges by focusing on meaningful community engagement. The goal of this paper is to introduce the pitfalls of existing interpretations of coastal resilience, describe the team-based approach applied to develop this framework, and provide a theoretical path forward that addresses the current challenges in describing coastal resilience. This new framework (a) integrates relevant factors of coastal resilience including hazards, exposure, vulnerability, adaptation, mitigation and preparedness to qualitatively explore a community’s perception and state of resilience which (b) transcends existing models and (c) can be interpreted through a variety of perspectives. This model can be applied to document and assess locally differential understandings of coastal resilience and to engage communities in reflections of their individual and collective sense of resilience. 

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4. The Conversion of Generational Effects into Collective Memories

   https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edw012  

   Schuman, Howard; Corning, Amy (September 2017, International Journal of Public Opinion Research)

   Three conclusions about collective memory are developed from data obtained before and after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States. First, gener- ational effects, as predicted by the critical years hypothesis, show that a dramatic new national or world event can have an impact on young cohorts that leads to a lasting collective memory. Second, for the September 11, 2001 attack, that effect was visible almost immediately after the event. Third, once a collective memory is established, it is retained by the affected cohorts as they age, as we show for the Vietnam War. We conceptualize the population as consisting of successive cohorts, each of which carries collective memories arising from major events that occurred during its critical years. 

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5. Policy diffusion in community-scale flood risk management.

   Noonan, D. S.; Richardson, L. E.; Sadiq, A. A. (January 2018, WIT transactions on engineering sciences)

   This study analyzes which communities adopted flood risk management practices during the past 25 years. In particular, we focus on community-scale flood management efforts undertaken voluntarily in towns and counties across the United States. In 1990, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency created the Community Rating System (CRS) to provide incentives to local governments to improve flood resilience. About 1,300 counties and cities voluntarily participate in the CRS, but most eligible communities do not participate. Here, we explore the factors shaping community CRS participation, such as flood risk, socio-economic characteristics, and economic resources, and we assess the competing phenomena of policy diffusion versus free riding. Previous models of community-scale flood mitigation activities have all considered each community’s decision as independent of one another. Yet one community’s flood management activities might directly or indirectly influence its neighbors’ mitigation efforts. Spillover effects or “contagion” may arise if neighboring communities learn from or seek to emulate or outcompete early adopting neighbors. Conversely, stricter regulation in one community may allow its neighbors to capitalize on looser regulation either by attracting more development or enjoying reduced “downstream” flood risks. This paper presents a conceptual model that allows for multiple forces affecting diffusion, such as copycatting and learning from neighboring communities, free-riding on neighbors’ efforts, and competing with neighbors to provide valuable amenities. We empirically test for these alternative diffusion pathways after controlling for the spatially correlated extant flood risks, building patterns, and demographics. The analysis integrates several large datasets to predict community flood risk management for all cities and counties in the US since 1990. Controls for local flood risk combined with a spatial lag regression model allow separate identification of alternative diffusion pathways. The results indicate strong evidence of copycatting and also suggest possible free-riding. 

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