Abstract
This chapter begins by outlining the increasing challenges experienced by communities before providing a much-needed critical appraisal of community development practitioners and their work with communities in building community resilience. It offers a critique of the traditional ‘adaption’ approach to community resilience used by community development practitioners to tackle these challenges. Highlighting the communities that community development practitioners have traditionally engaged with it argues that such an ‘adaption’ approach supports the ‘status quo’ rather than bring about real meaningful change to people’s lives.
Drawing on the authors experiences of working with communities it offers an alternative that challenges the existing ‘adaption’ orthodoxy instead posing a more politically based ‘confrontational’ approach that challenges power, social injustice, inequality and discrimination.
The chapter concludes with an open challenge for community practitioners to decide ‘whose side they are on’ when working with communities in building community resilience.
Rise like lions after slumber
In unfathomable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep have fallen on you –
Ye are many, they are few.
(Shelley, 1819)
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Green, R. (2023). Community Resilience, Moving from Adaption to Confrontation. In: Muia, D., Phillips, R. (eds) Connectedness, Resilience and Empowerment. Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35744-2_12
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