Community resilience and crisis management: policy lessons from the ground

Abstract

Community resilience is a central concept within crisis management policymaking, but it has escaped critical analysis. This article responds to this problem by examining a community-led response to a large natural disaster (the Queensland floods of 2010–11). The findings emerge from the application of a novel ethnographic method, uniquely informed by an insider’s view of the disaster, which generated narratives from ‘the ground’. These narratives highlight a darker side to community resilience, which is largely unacknowledged, but needs to be understood so that we can critically appraise the concept more effectively in the future.