Abstract
Resilience is an encompassing and multifaceted concept which traces its definition and evolution based on the field of discipline in which it is used - and more recently, in the disaster paradigm. There is a wide range of studies on urban resilience, but there have only been a few focusing on small islands as the geographical unit. A socio-ecological system could be used as a unit of analysis of resilience since resilience is a systemic concept. Hence, a small island can be considered as a socio-ecological system and was used as the unit of analysis in this thesis. There are gaps in defining disaster resilience of small islands through a socio-ecological systems approach. Moreover, there are few studies on using the participatory approach for determining indicators of disaster resilience which contribute to a research-policy gap in resilience studies.
This research aimed to develop an approach and framework based on indicators which were built and developed with the participation of communities and local practitioners in a case study site in the Philippines. It starts with a literature review of existing indicators and approaches and presents an initial framework based on socio-ecological systems approach. The initial phase explored the disaster resilience of small islands using the indicators in existing literature. The next two phases focus on building and developing indicators using participatory approaches involving the stakeholders on ground: the communities themselves and the local practitioners and national experts in the Philippines. This was done using soft-systems methodology and a variety of participatory tools such as key informant interviews, web-Delphi and experts’ interviews were utilized in combination with statistical analysis. Finally, an integrated and collaborative approach to assess the levels of disaster resilience of the island communities is introduced using the indicators which have been developed through the previous approaches.
The findings revealed that participatory approaches validate the existing indicators but also make way for emerging, new ones which have not been given the same attention and significance before. Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP) of an island community emerged as a highlight of the indicators indicating the significance of the inherent characteristics of the community to their resilience to disasters. The study also emphasizes that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach in the measurement of resilience and the development of various methodologies should be seen as a positive development in the field. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies strengthens the approach introduced in this thesis for assessing the resilience to disasters of island communities.