Beyond money: A social burden framework to enhance resilience valuation for tribal communities in the United States

Abstract

This article reflects on the present challenges of making proactive investments in critical infrastructure resilience and proposes recommendations for better integrating non-financial benefits into investment and project financing decision-making. Quantitative methodologies are required to enable communities, utilities, and financing organizations to evaluate return on investment through a more complete, socio-economic lens that more fully captures the true returns of alternative resilience proposals. Although this need is universal, it is further exacerbated in historically disadvantaged, under-resourced, and disenfranchised communities which were excluded from large-scale federal-level infrastructure investments in the past, and in which today, the onus of securing financing for infrastructure resilience projects falls on community members. This need is illustrated, and a solution for it demonstrated, through a case study of a successful implementation of such a techno-socio-economic resilience investment valuation framework in a tribal context.