Climate shocks are not just technical issues for communities that frequently face flooding; rather, they are social and institutional challenges wrought by governance gaps, persistent inequality, and the lack of involvement in decision-making. Contextualising resilience as a dynamic social process allows a critical (re)assessment of the ways adaptation approaches are developed, implemented, and sustained in the long run.
In Pakistan, flooding is now a persistent issue rather than an occasional calamity. For millions of people, floods have become a fundamental aspect of daily life due to seasonal monsoon unpredictability, increased glacial melt, and unregulated urban growth. Resilience holds an elevated importance in this context not because it seeks to reduce risks but because it helps explain why similar flood events result in radically varied outcomes across communities. Post-disaster, some communities bounce back rapidly, while others often get stuck in cycles of vulnerability, loss, and relocation. Mere exposure to a disaster cannot explain these differences, but a host of governance structures, social networks, resource accessibility, and institutional trust shape outcomes.
Resilience thinking pushes us to transcend the limited objective of ‘bouncing back’ to a previous position. Returning to pre-disaster conditions frequently entails returning to precarity for communities devastated by flooding. Rather, the significance of resilience enhances when it encapsulates communities’ ability to negotiate, adjust, and reorganize for better circumstances in the face of ongoing environmental hardship.
Even though grey infrastructure is indispensable for managing floods, its primacy in adaptation planning and climate mitigation sometimes mask deeper vulnerabilities. Embankments can divert floodwaters, but in so doing, they may put downstream communities at risk. Similarly, drainage systems may provide protection to ‘more valuable’ urban area, whereas informal settlements might still be vulnerable. Equating resilience with grey infrastructure solutions does not mitigate existing inequalities: it rather reinforces them.
More problematic is the fact that engineering solutions favour short-term visibility over long-term sustainability. Large projects are easier to measure and politically appealing, but they usually overlook community involvement, governance capability, and maintenance. Poor management or degradation of structures leaves the communities with a false sense of security that may increase losses during extreme events. In such situations, resilience jargon obscures rather than addresses vulnerability.
When resilience is contextualised as a social process, the focus shifts on decision-making, accountability, inclusion of communities’ voices, and the distribution of responsibilities. Communities vulnerable to frequent flooding often have a wealth of local knowledge regarding risk patterns, coping mechanisms, and early warning indicators. Nevertheless, formal decisions and planning procedures hardly incorporate this knowledge. This exclusion lowers policy effectiveness and erodes trust which is fundamental to collective resilience.
Equally important is institutional coordination. Overlapping mandates and accountability gaps are the common results of fragmented governance at all levels of governance. Affected communities receive emergency relief packages, but continued assistance to recovering livelihoods, maintaining housing, and restoring ecosystems is often lacking. Resilience does not emerge from isolated and discrete interventions but from the convergence of participatory governance, social protection, and environmental management.
In order to (re)formulating climate resilience beyond grey infrastructure, physical interventions may not be entirely foregone but should be integrated with overarching social policies. Even when physical defences fail, flood-prone communities should be able to adapt, something that can be achieved through investments in local leadership, education, land-use planning, and inclusive institutions. Importantly, by minimising exposure, enhancing adaptability, and maintaining livelihoods, nature-based solutions (NbS) like wetlands and floodplains restoration could supplement social resilience.
Furthermore, resilience must be measured by evaluating distributional results, not through the scale or magnitude of projects. Resilience planning must focus on the questions of who gains, who bears the costs, and who is still at risk even after adaptation measures are enacted.
Climate change ensured that natural disasters like floods will challenge societies in uncertain ways. Concrete alone cannot engender resilience in societies, especially in flood-prone areas. In the long run, adaptive governance, inclusive institutions, and social learning can enhance resilience. Viewing resilience as an evolving social process can help both policymakers and researchers to focus on approaches that can actually benefit communities who live under constant environmental uncertainty.
Further Reading:
Writers of this blog post are Naveed Imran, Doctoral Researcher of Cultural Anthropology, and Simo Sarkki, Post doctoral researcher of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oulu.
“Compass for nature-based solutions – building a researcher network between global south and north” funded by Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience (FRONT) research programme at the University of Oulu.
"The good, the bad and the ugly - competitive land uses and resilience in rural social-ecological systems (LEONE)" funded by the University of Oulu Eudaimonia Institute.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.