ICRED: A multi-stakeholder approach for assessing the resilience to disaster of small island communities

Despite the ongoing challenge of the operationalization of the concept of resilience, it has become a significant global political agenda. However, the lack of integration among the sectors involved – academia, politicians, civil society, and local practitioners, has resulted in problems in the usefulness and efficacy in the operationalisation of the concept in the grassroots.  The lack of participation at the grassroots and the local practitioners’ level in developing indicators that has caused gaps in the definition, assessment, and operationalisation of the concept. The measurement of community resilience is considered a significant step towards reducing risk to disasters and increasing disaster preparedness and the capacity to adapt to various kinds of disaster. Assessment tools for resilience that were developed without the consideration of the insights, perspectives, knowledge, and experience of the stakeholders are in the danger of serving a different purpose which they were originally built for.

This paper introduces the Island Community Resilience to Disasters (ICRED) approach. An approach that is integrated, taking into account the different facets of a small island community’s resilience to disasters and aggregating the various indicators under the themes of small island disaster resilience. This approach is also multi-stakeholder, considering all the perspectives of the various stakeholders that play a role in the disaster resilience of a small island community – from the communities on ground, to the local decision-makers to the experts who work in the disaster risk management field.