On 2014 Jan 30, Hilda Bastian commented:

"Urgent work to do," across disciplines and approaches, sums up where we are very well. It's an important debate to have, if public health interventions are to be effective.

To develop practical methods and tools for measurement, it would be good to explicitly emphasize communities of shared identity more than Jewkes and Murcott's non-spatial definition of community did (Jewkes R, 1996). Whether it's gender, disability, indigenous, race, sexuality, illness or other shared identity, public health services can be particularly critical for those collectives (Bastian H, 1998).

I was puzzled by the value judgment layer Allmark and colleagues placed on resilience, though. Arguing that a woman who grew up in an abusive household and became a wealthy and successful criminal should not be "judged" as resilient strikes me as as way to get tangled in knots, rather than helping us clarify concepts. This is not a particular weakness of resilience as a concept in relation to other concepts.

Were she to form a gang, the members would likely be very strong in bonding social capital: the same issues arise irrespective of the measure, if value judgement is going to be conflated. It's a little like arguing that the concept of literacy is flawed, because of the consequences of what disadvantaged people might read.

The example seems to me to speak instead to the value of a concept of community resilience, rather than it being a conceptual challenge of the "resilience" part of the phrase. A key part of a community that moves towards less discrimination and greater public safety involves strengthening procedural justice (Mazerolle, 2013). The theoretical abused girl who becomes a criminal, may have had more respect for the laws of a community whose justice system had protected her as a child.

On 2014 Jan 29, Astier Almedom commented:

This is an important article essentially about the need to carefully define and measure (quantitatively), assess and profile (qualitatively and quantitatively, depending on which dimension of CR one is focusing on) community resilience - CR for short. However, the title suggests that public health practitioners (to whom the article is addressed) should shift their attention away from CR to other topics such as social capital, and does not say much about measurements of social capital to demonstrate how focusing on social capital may better address questions of poverty and health inequalities in the UK. The authors offer some caveats including one stating that they are not talking about CR in the context of disaster/emergency; and their concern is with the state of neighborhood-level deprivation and dysfunction in the UK.

I see three main flaws in the argument and blanket interpretation of CR advanced by this paper. The term resilience whose meaning and application the authors limit to the capacity to rebound or bounce back to "as-you-were" or "as-you-should-be" "end points" following interventions; and limiting the term "community" to place-based description are both problematic.

Firstly, "community resilience" when referring to human, collective capabilities is widely understood as the ability to be organized in order to collectively generate knowledge and co-learn about solutions to problems that affect the collective - in the process undergoing continual change and transformation. Periodic change and transformation may be marked by milestones, but they are not "end points" in themselves, since dynamic learning processes tend to be non-linear and non-stop. Social capital (bonding, bridging, and linking) certainly contributes to CR which is more about sustaining collective wellbeing - especially when public health practitioners and policy makers also engage in co-learning with the communities that are self-empowered to define their own needs and assert their rights for optimal public health services. Secondly, communities are understood as self-defined "interest groups" (see for example Jewkes and Murcott, 1996;1998 in the context of public health promotion in the UK) with memberships that are not necessarily spatially restricted. Such communities may generate and/or access social capital to ensure their sustained wellbeing. Thirdly, veering away from the applications of community resilience to disaster preparedness, mitigation and response gives a false impression that chronic issues of deprivation and ill-health are unrelated to disasters. For example, in retrospect, disasters like the UK urban housing planning of the 1960s which broke up functional neighborhoods replacing them with what became highly fragmented dysfunctional dwellings with little or no hope of generating trust, reciprocity, shared values and civic participation (social capital) have been linked to negative long-term impact on community health and social welfare. Another example: the absence of basic public health services such as water, sanitation, and hygiene that compel the affected public and public health practitioners alike to respectively rely on and recognize "community assets", creativity and innovation before, during and after the not-so-infrequent flooding disasters in the UK. Indeed, public health services in the UK and elsewhere need to connect the dots between chronic and acute disasters by recognizing that the sector as a whole needs to be at the forefront of preparing, mitigating, and responding to emergencies that frequently expose underlying chronic deprivation and health inequalities.

While it is important to provoke discussion and debate on the problems associated with rhetorical promotions of community resilience as 'the new panacea' (which it is not) in public health promotion, breaking up the phrase into its constituent parts (which in this case are both highly emotive words), is bound to perpetuate the destructive philosophical-ideological resilience discourse of late, seemingly throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Public health policy makers, scholars and practitioners all have urgent work to do - discuss and agree on coherent and practical sets of methods and tools for measuring, assessing and profiling (MAP) community resilience. This involves cognitive skills to enable us to adopt new ways of learning and co-learning across academic disciplines and public health practice sectors - creating and sustaining Communities of Practice. It also requires engagement with (positive) emotion because both cognition and emotion are equally implicated in understanding the concept of community resilience itself; and mutual understanding between the "deprived" communities of interest and the professionals and practitioners whose mandate is to serve - unlearn old ways, learn and co-learn new skills to co-manage change and transformation.

Interestingly, the concept of social capital was also critically debated in the mid-late 1990s before increased frequency and magnitude of disasters of all types occurring in this young century necessitated the focus to shift to the fundamental topics of human resilience (both individual and collective), organizational/institutional resilience, and ecosystem resilience all at the same time. This has brought new impetus to the process of our learning and co-learning about sustainability, the ultimate "measure" of human community resilience.

On 2014 Jan 29, Astier Almedom commented:

This is an important article essentially about the need to carefully define and measure (quantitatively), assess and profile (qualitatively and quantitatively, depending on which dimension of CR one is focusing on) community resilience - CR for short. However, the title suggests that public health practitioners (to whom the article is addressed) should shift their attention away from CR to other topics such as social capital, and does not say much about measurements of social capital to demonstrate how focusing on social capital may better address questions of poverty and health inequalities in the UK. The authors offer some caveats including one stating that they are not talking about CR in the context of disaster/emergency; and their concern is with the state of neighborhood-level deprivation and dysfunction in the UK.

I see three main flaws in the argument and blanket interpretation of CR advanced by this paper. The term resilience whose meaning and application the authors limit to the capacity to rebound or bounce back to "as-you-were" or "as-you-should-be" "end points" following interventions; and limiting the term "community" to place-based description are both problematic.

Firstly, "community resilience" when referring to human, collective capabilities is widely understood as the ability to be organized in order to collectively generate knowledge and co-learn about solutions to problems that affect the collective - in the process undergoing continual change and transformation. Periodic change and transformation may be marked by milestones, but they are not "end points" in themselves, since dynamic learning processes tend to be non-linear and non-stop. Social capital (bonding, bridging, and linking) certainly contributes to CR which is more about sustaining collective wellbeing - especially when public health practitioners and policy makers also engage in co-learning with the communities that are self-empowered to define their own needs and assert their rights for optimal public health services. Secondly, communities are understood as self-defined "interest groups" (see for example Jewkes and Murcott, 1996;1998 in the context of public health promotion in the UK) with memberships that are not necessarily spatially restricted. Such communities may generate and/or access social capital to ensure their sustained wellbeing. Thirdly, veering away from the applications of community resilience to disaster preparedness, mitigation and response gives a false impression that chronic issues of deprivation and ill-health are unrelated to disasters. For example, in retrospect, disasters like the UK urban housing planning of the 1960s which broke up functional neighborhoods replacing them with what became highly fragmented dysfunctional dwellings with little or no hope of generating trust, reciprocity, shared values and civic participation (social capital) have been linked to negative long-term impact on community health and social welfare. Another example: the absence of basic public health services such as water, sanitation, and hygiene that compel the affected public and public health practitioners alike to respectively rely on and recognize "community assets", creativity and innovation before, during and after the not-so-infrequent flooding disasters in the UK. Indeed, public health services in the UK and elsewhere need to connect the dots between chronic and acute disasters by recognizing that the sector as a whole needs to be at the forefront of preparing, mitigating, and responding to emergencies that frequently expose underlying chronic deprivation and health inequalities.

While it is important to provoke discussion and debate on the problems associated with rhetorical promotions of community resilience as 'the new panacea' (which it is not) in public health promotion, breaking up the phrase into its constituent parts (which in this case are both highly emotive words), is bound to perpetuate the destructive philosophical-ideological resilience discourse of late, seemingly throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Public health policy makers, scholars and practitioners all have urgent work to do - discuss and agree on coherent and practical sets of methods and tools for measuring, assessing and profiling (MAP) community resilience. This involves cognitive skills to enable us to adopt new ways of learning and co-learning across academic disciplines and public health practice sectors - creating and sustaining Communities of Practice. It also requires engagement with (positive) emotion because both cognition and emotion are equally implicated in understanding the concept of community resilience itself; and mutual understanding between the "deprived" communities of interest and the professionals and practitioners whose mandate is to serve - unlearn old ways, learn and co-learn new skills to co-manage change and transformation.

Interestingly, the concept of social capital was also critically debated in the mid-late 1990s before increased frequency and magnitude of disasters of all types occurring in this young century necessitated the focus to shift to the fundamental topics of human resilience (both individual and collective), organizational/institutional resilience, and ecosystem resilience all at the same time. This has brought new impetus to the process of our learning and co-learning about sustainability, the ultimate "measure" of human community resilience.