Configurations of community in flood risk management

ABSTRACT

Despite a notable increase in the literature on community resilience, the notion of ‘community’ remains underproblematised. This is evident within flood risk management (FRM) literature, in which the understanding and roles of communities may be acknowledged but seldom discussed in any detail. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how community networks are configured by different actors, whose roles and responsibilities span spatial scales within the context of FRM. Accordingly, the authors analyse findings from semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and household surveys from two flood prone areas in Finnish Lapland. The analysis reveals that the ways in which authorities, civil society, and informal actors take on multiple roles are intertwined and form different types of networks. By implication, the configuration of community is fuzzy, elusive and situated, and not confined to a fixed spatiality. The authors discuss the implications of the complex nature of community for FRM specifically, and for community resilience more broadly. They conclude that an analysis of different actors across scales contributes to an understanding of the configuration of community, including community resilience, and how the meaning of community takes shape according to the differing aims of FRM in combination with differing geographical settings.