Social Capital and Disaster Resilience in the Ninth Ward
Keywords:
Social capital, disasters, climate change, New Orleans, recovery, social equity, Capital social, desastres, cambio climático, Nueva Orleans, recuperación, igualdad socialAbstract
The conventional wisdom in disaster management is that communities exhibiting social capital are more likely to bounce back after disaster. This paper examines the link between social capital and resilience to disasters and climate change through an examination of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood before and after Hurricane Katrina. Using archives and interviews to examine the neighborhood’s recovery, the paper finds evidence for the existence of social capital and the properties of community resilience in the Lower Ninth Ward before the storm. Social capital and resilience proved to be fragile because the neighborhood was particularly vulnerable and lacked political power. Attempts to use social capital and community resilience alone as part of a strategy to combat climate change should take into account older notions of vulnerability and political power as important ingredients in community well-being.
Este artículo analiza la relación entre capital social y resiliencia ante los desastres y ante el cambio climático a través de una observación del barrio de Lower Ninth Ward de Nueva Orleans antes y después del huracán Katrina. Utilizando archivos y entrevistas para examinar la recuperación de esa área, el artículo encuentra pruebas de que ya antes del huracán había capital social y las cualidades propias de la resiliencia comunitaria en el Lower Ninth Ward. El capital social y la resiliencia resultaron ser frágiles porque el barrio era especialmente vulnerable y carecía de poder político. Los intentos de utilizar el capital social y la resiliencia comunitaria como parte de la estrategia para combatir el cambio climático deberían fijarse en nociones más antiguas de vulnerabilidad y de poder político como ingredientes importantes para el bienestar comunitario.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1065
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 213
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.