Beyond boundaries: What makes a community resilient? A Systematic Review

Abstract

Community resilience is an essential paradigm in an age marked by unprecedented natural and anthropocentric risks. This study aims to examine and re-interpret the main dimensions, indicators, methods, and indexes used in the community resilience discourse. For this purpose, we used The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to analyse a total number of 47 articles in the period between 2010 and 2023 (August) in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. Findings show that social, economic, physical, and community capital dimensions are commonly preferred for measuring community resilience. Education level, income, PVA (Potentially Vulnerable Areas), medical capacity, and community networks are widely used as indicators. Although social, economic, and physical dimensions and indicators are commonly used, our empirical results demonstrate these stereotyped dimensions and indicators do not exhibit significant relationships for investigating community resilience. On the other hand, community networks and place attachment as indicators of community capital show substantial correlations. This incongruity uncovers the complex dynamics of community resilience by highlighting the importance of capital-based dimensions and the area-specific paradigm shift in selecting indicators.