Sustainable community development, networks and resilience.

Abstract

In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, communities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify. This is particularly difficult for communities that are marginalized, dealing with poverty, homelessness, and addiction. However, social capital can be harnessed to create the community agency needed to foster sustainable development. This paper focuses on the ability of community networks to build social capital critical to the creation of the resilience needed to sustain communities. It draws on a case study of a community-driven initiative taking place on the East Side of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, a community with very low levels of economic capital.

Dans un monde imprevisible et en constante evolution, le developpement durable des collectivites est davantage un processus dynamique de travail avec les ressources et l'information disponibles qu'un but en soi. Afin de soutenir un tel processus dynamique interactif, les collectivites doivent prevoir cette dynamique et y reagir, tout en cultivant leur resilience afin d'innover et de se diversifier. Cela est particulierement difficile pour les collectivites qui sont marginalisees et qui doivent composer avec la pauvrete, le sans-abrisme et la toxicomanie. II est neanmoins possible de mobiliser l'organisme communautaire necessaire pour favoriser le developpement durable. Dans cet article, les auteurs evaluent la capacite des reseaux communautaires a former le capital social essentiel a la resilience necessaire pour soutenir les collectivites, en se fondant sur l'etude du cas d'une initiative communautaire ayant lieu dans le quartier Downtown East Side de Vancouver, en Colombie Britannique, ou vit une collectivite dont le capital economique est tres faible.

Keywords

Sustainable development, social capital, resilience, community, adaptive management, diversity

Introduction

The concept of sustainable development is growing in popularity as it is embraced by governments, businesses, and communities faced with environmental, social, and economic uncertainties. Although the concept certainly has its critics, such as the assertion by Luke (2005) that sustainable development merely endorses a different kind of consumerist development, there is a growing movement to consider the ecological and social impacts of economic initiatives.

As many community groups in Canada are initiating projects to increase the sustainability of their communities, our research group became interested in whether such initiatives are producing long term changes. We were particularly interested in the application of the "three pillar" definition of sustainable development; that of sustainable development involving the reconciliation of three imperatives. These are the ecological imperative to live within global biophysical carrying capacity and maintain biodiversity, the social imperative to ensure the development of a healthy and functional society, and the economic imperative to ensure that basic needs are met worldwide (Dale 2001; Robinson and Tinker 1997). This is a general enough definition to allow for sustainable development to be interpreted differently in specific socio-geographic situations and to remain meaningful in the face of the dominant element of our societies: the element of change.

The concept of a "sustainable community" is difficult to define. They are communities that meet the needs of current and future residents while respecting the environment and quality of life. Although ecological and economic aspects of sustainability have been addressed by several writers--Kunstler (1993) for example, addresses these issues in relation to urban form--the social aspect of a sustainable community has received less attention. It has been said that the social dimension is the weakest "pillar" of sustainable development (Lehtonen 2004); we have focused our research on social aspects of sustainable development in order to study how social structure informs economic and ecological sustainability.

Community level sustainable development takes place at a critical level of response between the national and individual level. These community responses tend to be self-organizing and based upon response to specific issues of critical concern to their community. However, communities with few economic resources can find it difficult to effectively create change within their neighbourhoods. In previous research we found that for such action to occur communities needed to have networks of social capital in place that could create the agency for change (Newman and Dale 2005).

Social capital has been defined in several ways; Coleman (1990) and Portes (1998) explicitly conceptualized social capital as an asset held by individuals, whereas Putnam has explored the ways in which it operates as a community asset held by all. Putnam (2000) defines social capital as "social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." Social capital, in this sense, is the connections that a group can use to achieve its objectives. In this paper, we also consider/apply Kadushin's (2004) definition of social capital as network diversity.

The ability to turn social capital into action can be viewed as a group's agency. Agency is the ability of a group to respond to challenges. There are several definitions of agency, including "the capacity of persons to transform existing states of affairs" (Harvey 2002), "the capacity to plan and initiate action" (Onyx and Bullen 2000) and the "ability to respond to events outside of one's immediate sphere of influence to produce a desired effect" (Bhaskar 1994). A group's agency will impact its ability to successfully engage with sustainable development issues.

Our particular research focus has been the study of sustainable development initiatives within marginalized communities. These communities often have limited access to ecological, social and economic capital, and they often struggle with addiction, poverty and homelessness. The particular case study examined in this paper is an organization called United We Can (www.unitedwecan.ca), which was established as a not-for-profit agency in 1995. The organization evolved from a loose, ad hoc network of homeless men and women known as dumpster divers or binners who live and work in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, one of Canada's poorest and most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Networks of Social Capital

During investigation of the United We Can initiative, we were particularly interested in the use of social networks to offset the disadvantages presented by the lack of economic capital in the community. In communities of all sorts, but particularly in those with little economic capital, social networks contain the social capital that can bring agency to bear on system-induced problems (Newman and Dale 2005). Agency is needed for citizens to be able to adapt to their cultural environment (Horvath 1998) and the structure of one's network affects one's ability to adapt to a significant change in the environment (Gargiulo and Benassi 2000).

Networks are composed of social ties which are often grouped into two main types; 'bonding' and 'bridging' ties (Putnam 2000; Onyx and Bullen 2000), although others continue to use the terms "strong" and "weak" following the lead of Granovetter (1973). Bonding ties are connections between people who know each other very well, such as family connections and connections between close friends. Bridging ties are connections to people outside of one's own local groups.

Critical to enabling social capital are the bridging ties that link together clusters of tightly bonded individuals (Granovetter 1973). It is a web of diverse interconnections that enable community resilience (Newman and Dale 2005) as the bonding ties allow internal groups to form and function and the bridging ties allow access to outside resources. Further, a mix of weak and strong ties creates both safety and adaptability (Gargiulo and Benassi 2000). As a more concrete example, in a disadvantaged community, civic society organizations bridge rich donors and poor clients. They must maintain ties in both worlds to be effective (Ashman et al. 1998). We were interested in the role bridging ties play in creating change in a very disadvantaged community.

Critical features of social capital and network formation include the ability of local groups to self-organize and to realize adaptive co-management systems, mobilizing social networks to connect institutions and organizations across levels and scales (Olsson et al. 2004). This kind of bridging network formation, which allows a community to reach beyond its boundaries, appears critical for effectively engaging with system-scale problems that might stretch far beyond an individual community. As an example, Krishna (2001), in a study of villages in India, found that agency was necessary if groups were to successfully interact with officials. The villages in which people believed they could attract the attention of officials and achieve needed permits and government support were the most successful at reaching sustainable development goals. In contrast, Volker and Flap (2001) found the lack of bridging ties in East German communities greatly reduced community agency. Although these communities were well connected internally, they had no access to external resources, limiting their agency.

Uncertainty and Resilience