Mapping the role of social capital in measured community resilience over time

Climate disasters, exacerbated by climate change and increasing vulnerability, pose significant threats to human health, livelihoods, and development gains, particularly for low-income communities. Building community resilience requires a holistic approach that considers not only physical infrastructure and economic resources but also social factors such as learning and collective action. The Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance (ZCRA) has dedicated the past 12 years to fostering collaborative efforts with communities and across sectors to assess and enhance resilience. A key outcome of this work is the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) framework, developed in 2013 as a pioneering tool to quantify community-level flood resilience. Recognizing the critical need for a robust framework in the absence of established, empirically validated alternatives, the FRMC has been successfully applied in over 300 flood-prone communities worldwide, proving its value as a self-assessment tool for engage and empower community members to identifying areas for improvement and guiding effective intervention implementation.

For this study we use the FRMC grading of 44 sources of resilience, measured at the start and end of the Phase 2 project period (2018-2023) across 296 communities as well as the qualitative evaluations of the grade changes reported by practitioners. Conducting an in-depth thematic analysis of the qualitative evaluations on (un)realized resilience, we identify mechanisms impacting individual resilience capitals (natural, social, human, financial, physical) and create a system map to note the interactions to social capital. We find that social capital is the most interconnected capital to other capitals and that community participation, gender inclusivity, local leadership and inter-community coordination are the main mechanisms affecting social capital. We assess and compare the global mechanisms and map of social capital to contextualize the resilience dynamics and pathway of communities in Malawi, noting the distinctions in the role of social capital as an enabler, outcome and impact. Our study aims to contribute to the growing focus on social capital impacting community resilience. This research goes further by identifying how these mechanisms interact, developing a system map of community resilience.