Resilience experts Dr Karen Potter and Dr Sarah Fitton try to define flood management's "R word"
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What does resilience even mean?
It's a term that gets bandied around a lot - in press releases, government briefings and every new bit of environmental policy... but are there social, political and economic contexts and caveats that mean that in reality, the aim to make communities more "resilient" isn't being achieved? Or are we all more prepared for challenges that things like flooding - especially groundwater flooding - bring... because we are familiar with the concept of resilience and are supported to make it happen?
Host Katie Hargrave-Smith is joined by two experts in the field - Dr Karen Potter and Dr Sarah Fitton - who have undertaken considerable research into the term "resilience" - it's history, political DNA and relevance to communities dealing with the challenges of all types of flooding, including groundwater.
Plus, to get the real-life lived experience of a community member affected by groundwater flooding, Simon Collings from Oxford Flood Alliance talks about what resilience really looks like at ground level.
You can access Dr Karen Potter and Dr Sarah Fitton's report on Resilience, here: 1713945164.pdf (projectgroundwater.co.uk)
Welcome to Groundwater Rising. This podcast is all about flooding, with a focus on the forgotten source of flooding, groundwater flooding. Groundwater flooding is the least understood, least monitored, and least reported on. It is often left out of the conversation, so we are a podcast dedicated to changing that.
I'm Katie Hargrave Smith from Project Groundwater, and in each episode of this podcast I will be speaking to community members from around the UK who have to deal with groundwater flooding, and industry experts trying to help them. Together, we will uncover the latest research, innovation and strategies from the water sector, academia and beyond.
In this episode, we are talking about resilience. Resilience is a term that in the flood risk sector, we are starting to see show up in policy and plans. But what does it actually mean? Joining me today are two people who have started to unravel this question. Dr. Karen Potter and Dr. Sarah Fitton have undertaken extensive research into this topic, looking at the definition.
of resilience and writing a working paper to tease out some of the issues. Sarah and Karen, welcome to Groundwater Rising. So yeah, hello everyone. I'm, I'm Sarah Fitton. I'm the director and founder of Aurora Engagements. And we specialize in working on stakeholder engagement and social value in the built environment.
And we've got a specific focus on communities at risk of flooding. Hello, yes, I'm Karen Potter from The Open University. I'm very interested in community resilience from a social science perspective. So I'm involved with Project Groundwater through PhD and also a little bit of research for myself, including working closely with Sarah.
Okay, so to kick things off, Sarah, tell me, what does resilience mean to you? Oh, that's the question, isn't it? So I think to me personally, and I think this is probably the approach we take when we're working with communities, Resilience means someone having the agency to be able to respond to an event and to recover from an event themselves with as little impact as possible in terms of damage.
Now obviously we've seen Dubai that there's stuff that we just can't even predict is going to happen, but I think resilience is all about having those skills and the knowledge to be able to try in some way to to help and to respond in those events and also to be able to recover from as quickly as possible with as little impact in, you know, your, your life.
Karen, I'm coming to you next. Where did this term come from, and how has it kind of evolved and changed over time to where we use it now? Yeah, I think we go back to the the 1970s. There was an ecologist called Holling, and at that time it was very Theoretical is an academic in the U S and he started in thinking about ecosystems.
He was challenging what was a, an engineering definition of resilience, which was for resilient ecosystems. If they face some kind of stress or disturbance that they'd be able to bounce back to their original state. And what he argued was that it wasn't about resisting this disturbance, but resilience instead was some kind of measurement of how quickly.
the ecosystem could return following this stress. But to note, it's really theoretical. It's about mathematical modeling right at the beginning. But then it started to evolve to more, um, social ecological thinking. We're moving now into the eighties. And if you think back to both the seventies and the eighties, we're really starting to look at environmental change.
We're starting to look at the human impact on the environment, you know, the likes of silent spring coming out. And we're thinking about. The human element. So at first you've got ecologists working on ecosystems and then we think, well, we can't keep the human element separate from this. We've got to think about the human activities, how they're degrading environments, but also, you know, how do we improve our governance and management of ecosystem services?
So this is when we start to think about the social capacity for learning and adaptation to come in as well. And also, you know, picking up on what Sarah said, that, that need to manage uncertainty as well, that we can't predict what's going to happen. So we need to be prepared. We need to learn to live with this.
And then there's that kind of, move across as well to international policy agenda and the UN in particular, really active in this area. They were looking at increased urbanization and a lot of disasters. Again, we're talking through the 90s and they began to think, you know, are these natural disasters?
Are they purely natural or are they social as well? And they were, the UN really pushing for us to recognize the need to prevent disasters. So, you know, not. Building in at risk areas or if you did to have strict building codes thinking about warning systems, etc Whereas previously we might thought more about relief efforts now It was no it's more effective to prepare than to rely on relief efforts if this interplay isn't it between policy when practice and the academic theorizing You start to see the social sciences coming in as well.
So although we've looked at the human impact, you start to have the likes of disaster studies, health, et cetera, really community development fields, really looking at the social science of resilience. So how are stresses impacting social systems? And again. The importance of communities here, which Sarah and I are really interested in, that community focus, that communities are on the front line, going to have to deal with these events, the aftermath of events.
So, We need to recognize communities agency to see them as being empowered, some kind of ownership of risk as well. So if we've got, for instance, warning systems, communities need to pay heed to the warning systems to understand that. So overall we saw this shift really from disaster vulnerability to resilience.
And I think at the heart of that, we're really interested in that appreciation of the knowledge and the ability. I think Sarah's picked up on the ability, immediately, of local communities in this. When I was reading, because you've written a paper on this, when I was reading your paper I saw that there were kind of three levels that this term has gone through, from shock absorbing, to bouncing backwards, to bouncing forward.
Sarah, could you comment a bit on the bouncing forward element of resilience? Yeah, and I think that this is kind of where we're, we're, we're heading to now in the sense that it's almost like Karen said, it's almost taking that proactive response, rather than reactive. So it's being prepared, it's having the skills and the training and the knowledge to know what to do.
When something's either about to happen or is predicted to happen or is actually happening in compared to that kind of bounce back where it's the reactive response to when something's happened this is how we're going to be a bit more resilient because it's hopefully going to help us bounce back quicker.
The bounce forward is about being proactive and understanding what communities need to do like Karen said and and I think for us that's where Our interest really lies because it's understanding how communities can develop their resilience so that they're equipped with the knowledge and the skills and the resources if, if it's resource intensive, to be able to be prepared and to bounce forward so that those impacts when they are felt, and they are going to be felt, unfortunately, we're not going to be able to stop flooding full stop and we're not going to be able to stop groundwater full stop.
So it's about understanding how we can minimize those impacts as much as we can. We're now in that proactive phase, or we hope, you know, we're going to go into that proactive phase. It's that uncertainty of climate change, isn't it, Sarah? Yeah. This actually brings me on to the next question with that comment on climate change.
Why do you think that resilience is suddenly being banded around? Because maybe five years ago, we weren't hearing that term so much. And yet in the flood industry recently, I feel like resilience is Every single project that starts up, every single fund that comes out seems to be related to resilience.
Karen, why do you think that is? I think talking about the, you know, the international level, particularly UN policy, that is really influencing down to a national agenda. And from the UK perspective, it's been very much driven from the cabinet office. Going back 20 years now is more in response to terrorism and looking at how the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, and this was looking at both approach to man made and natural threats, very much on the response end, I feel.
And then it's been in relative terms, because we've talked now about this history of resilience over a few decades, but it's become more predominant and certainly coming through into national policy in about the last six years. You start to hear ministers talking about resilience and it's seen as more of a long term approach, but I think, is it a new approach or more of an evolution because we've already seen that shift from flood defences to flood risk management.
We've had more emphasis already on natural flood management, property flood resilience, etc. But I think, and perhaps argue, that what's different here with resilience is more of an emphasis on communities sharing or taking responsibility for flood risk. I don't know what you think, Sarah, about that. No, I completely agree, Karen.
I think We've seen a shift over the last few years, and I think why resilience has become important in an industry and practice perspective, definitely, is because I think we've realised that the engineering technical responses that we've historically used to flooding just aren't cutting it anymore, and you know, unfortunately we're seeing more people at risk of flooding and the different types of flooding, including groundwater, and there's that realisation that actually the engineering Defenses aren't going to do what we need them to do.
Looking at different ways that we can start to protect ourselves and help ourselves. And I think there's also the element where communities are becoming a lot more empowered and I don't think there's that. reliance that heavily on organizations to protect them anymore. Communities want to take their own lead and help themselves as well.
That's where resilience has become so vocal, should we say. This did coincide with the shift to the big society initiative. And that was very much more broadly about active citizenship, volunteering, et cetera, for building resilient neighborhoods. But that did coincide. It was coupled with, with very deep cuts in local government spending as well.
So the politics is there. And then to go back to your question, why has this come through to flood risk management in England? I think it's because the cabinet office said we had to. So that's come through into our strategy and we've had to grapple with resilience. But it's, it's so, so complicated if we've got this complex history.
And we're using resilience as if it's something real and tangible, but remember, it's a theory, it's conceptualized. And we've got this real mishmash, really, of thinking from all different disciplines. And I think you can see from this, talking about the social ecological perspective, you can appreciate we can't build ourselves.
Out of trouble with bigger defenses. And we perhaps need to look at human impact and looking at more natural flood management interventions in the face of climate change. We need to manage uncertainty. We need to change. We need to be prepared. We need to, to some extent, live with it. And Sarah saying we need to empower communities, need to be involved in decision making, adapting to uncertainty, but with this cutting resources as well.
Is there enough thought? On who's taking responsibility for uncertainty, who else other than communities, do we look at unacceptable developments, you know, lack of governance. If we're empowering communities, then how do we actually do this? I mean, the cabinet office very much centered on complementing the emergency services, but I think Sarah and I, with this 40 page working paper, we really want to look at that huge amount of theory from social resilience and what does empowering communities really mean, how does this really happen, and then how does this sit well with deep cuts in spending at the same time.
Do you think that with this focus on community agency and community empowerment, there is also a risk that communities will be forced to shoulder a lot of the responsibility for their own flood risk rather than the government and authorities? I do think there is that risk, and I think at this moment in time, we're probably in that strange grey area where we risk kind of putting too much on the community, or there is maybe some organisations that don't want to give the power to communities, so they are holding too much of it back.
So I think, um, What there needs to be is that middle ground where it's collaborative approach by the organizations that, you know, can empower those communities and give them the skills and the knowledge that they need. But also they still have that supportive angle so they don't just give everything to the community and say, right, there we go.
You're on your own now, but it's about the communities having enough everyday knowledge and skills and resources to help themselves. But knowing that those larger organizations that can provide the high level support are there and when it's needed, they work together. And I think that's the most effective way.
But I do think there is, in terms of cuts and resource depletion, There is a massive risk that communities will just be left on their own to fend for themselves under this banner of, well, you're resilient and you need to develop your own resilience and everything like that. I think unfortunately, especially in, in this country, I think we're probably going to see that variation in within different communities.
I think there's going to be communities that are going to be well supported and well empowered and then unfortunately I think we're going to see other communities which are just left to their own devices with little support. I totally agree with Sarah and I was, I was thinking about this from a personal perspective.
You know, when you think about what's resilience, that ability to manage stress, if you were talking from a health perspective, would we expect the NHS to walk away? Or would we expect that support from our GP? And I think in terms of that shift to resilience in flood risk management, there will certainly be households, small business owners that feel That resilience is more about lack of resources and they will feel very isolated.
There's an academic called Ian White who used to be at Manchester University, now in New Zealand, and he was just saying how resilience has this ability to reframe a debate and push it down a particular path and that could be beneficial for some. But by no means for everybody. And if we've got this shift and there's certainly some shift in responsibility from state to individual, we're not tackling who pays for this.
So, you know, those with power, those with some resources may be able to engage with us and look after themselves and even influence resilience agendas from the state, but others are either going to be less able or, you know, just cannot respond to this. There's some households just only getting by at the moment, so, you know, really to say you build resilience, flood resilience, come and engage with a flood group, is that going to factor on their priority list at the moment?
We've got real inequalities, real vulnerabilities. I was saying, Sarah, weren't we, that This community is going to be left high and dry, but that's aspirational, it's more about being low and wet. So, we really do need to bring social perspectives to the foreground and as, as Sarah's talking about, it's not a shift in resources, it's more a change in how we resource things, how we have different skill sets.
We need to have an open debate about this. So it's more explicit, and I think, you know, Project Groundwater is really opening up that conversation as well. And we've got funding at the moment, but, you know, how do we scale up the innovations that we've got at the moment and look beyond the project in the longer term?
I feel like this is the perfect time to bring in Simon. So I recently spoke to Simon from the Oxford Flood Alliance, um, on his thoughts on resilience. My name is Simon Collings. I live in Oxford, and I'm a member of the Oxford Flood Alliance, which is a group that formed in 2007 after the very bad flooding in the summer of that year, and which has been working across the community, both on improving response to floods when they happen, but also working on some longer term solutions to reduce the overall flood risk in the city, and that that includes a component of groundwater flooding in some areas.
We have quite a complicated mix of sources of flooding here. We've obviously got the river and there are various kind of tributaries that run through the city. There are some areas of the city where ground water starts to rise in people's gardens and under their homes before the river has broken its banks and is starting to kind of move across.
towards those residential areas. And then we also have a problem with sewers becoming surcharged with groundwater or surface water that's kind of got into them, partly because we've got a lot of old housing stock where foul water and rainwater aren't separated, and very kind of antiquated sewers in some places.
So you've got this kind of hellish combination of these sort of things that happen, and they happen in a different sequence. So depending on how high the river levels get. You might actually just experience basically a groundwater flooding event in some of those kinds of areas. So, we have to think about all of these different levels and the indications of what's happening and how that sort of situation could evolve in thinking about how we kind of respond to this.
So, here where I am, We also have a little issue with groundwater as well, so the first thing that we would be doing, even before the river has started to come over the bank, is we'd have a pump down here that's basically pumping out groundwater into the river because we're so close to the river. It's communicating with the groundwater very directly and it's just kind of pushing up in areas of the island that are a bit lower than the level of the bank.
Um, so it's, it can be quite complex. I know there are other areas where groundwater is, you know, on chalk hills, for example, you've got a kind of different issue, but we're, we're right on the river. We're quite similar to what I understand happens in Marlow, um, which is similar kind of location to us.
Groundwater doesn't necessarily come on its own. It comes as part of a package of things and, um, it's probably the thing that is least understood. We've got great telemetry on the river system now and can track pretty much what's going on on that, but we don't have such a good understanding of what's happening in the groundwater and we particularly don't really have a good early warning system for when things are happening, which is one of the things that I'm currently talking to Project Groundwater about, what we can do about that.
Those are some of the issues that we're really trying to work on. look at with Project Groundwater, this lack of understanding, this lack of data, the relationship between the floods, the flood sources, they're not, they're not well understood when groundwater comes into it, but we know that it's not just river flooding, just groundwater, just surface water, they do interact.
What does resilience mean to you? At a very simple level, I suppose it means the ability to come through a major disruptive event, in this case a flood. and for people to be able to recover from that quickly or a wider community to be able to recover from that quickly because it's not just households and businesses that are affected but roads and possibly other infrastructure.
So, so that would include things at a very low, small scale level. Like in the community where I live, the most vulnerable houses now have some flood protection equipment, flood gates, and um, submersible pumps and air brick covers. We know when flooding is imminent from their flood warning system. A couple of decades, like myself and have been through a number of flood events, know exactly.
what the kind of early signs looked like actually in the community. People would know when we needed to call in a help, when to start to put stuff in place in their own homes. You know, in our case, we require the environment agency to come and bring a pump down to help pump water back out into the river.
So typically we would kind of trigger that, but then we've kind of looked beyond Just the community level because and I might have already mentioned the kind of central role the Environment Agency plays They also deploy some barriers down here to stop water coming across from the river as it kind of gets higher The City Council is involved in a similar way and other communities near here There are certain things you can do at a community level to be resilient stopping water getting to your house and doing things to your house to enable you to recover quickly, but you also need the involvement of other agencies who have access to bigger resources to come in and supplement what you can do at a community level and so Having a good relationship with the local category one responders, the Environment Agency and the City Council, is critical to making sure that this whole thing works.
And in 2007, the response was pretty chaotic. I think everybody recognised that. But over the years, we've been able to hone a fairly tight and targeted response now with different people knowing what they're doing triggers that automatically kind of result in various actions being taken in preparation for a flood getting worse and so The flooding in January this year, which was the worst we've seen in 10 years, and there were only a tiny number of properties in Oxford City that were actually affected by flooding because of the quality of the response.
But then I'd argue that resilience in the community is also about thinking beyond what you can do to respond to a flood event when it happens and thinking about what could be changed in the built environment around us that could reduce Risk of flooding to houses and businesses and direct flood water and other other directions so that it avoided property flooding and that that's really kind of what we have also been doing since 2007, partly prompted by an awareness that climate change.
Almost certainly means we're going to see bigger and worse floods over time. It's not just about sitting here and kind of being ready. It's about thinking ahead about what can be done. And the biggest result of that here has been the development of a, a very large flood relief. A flood alleviation scheme for Oxford.
It's a 176 million scheme that's going through the planning process at the moment. A result of ten years of detailed work and consultation. If you are using community to mean Oxford, which is the way it's sometimes used in various policy documents and so on. It's also about thinking about that kind of bigger picture and what can be done to make the city more resilient to flooding.
So that it doesn't get flooded. Damage it economically and affect people's lives and cause health problems and all the other stuff that is attendant upon them frequent flooding and you brought up a very good point there of also the Word community and the meaning of community and how it in this case is applying to oxford as a whole but do you feel that The use of the term community with resilience has any issues as well?
Well, a bit like with resilience, I think it needs kind of breaking down, so that in any particular context we're clear what we're talking about. Are we talking about a group of 30 houses in a particular neighbourhood that's prone to groundwater flooding? Or are we talking about that section of the city that's affected by flood water directly, or are we talking about the wider city, which of course is also affected by major arterial roads being closed, the railway being closed, and so on.
So it has a different meaning in different contexts, I think, and it's important to be clear what it is we're talking about, otherwise it can lead to some confusion, I think. And there's been a move towards resilience to flooding rather than preventing flooding in flood risk management. Do you think this has been a positive thing?
I think there's been a recognition over some time now that building higher flood walls and trying to hold water back just isn't going to work. The design of the big flood scheme here is really about recontouring the existing flood plain to direct water through fields to the west, on the western side of the city and away from the residential areas.
So it's a kind of working with nature approach, but it's absolutely critical to reducing flood risk. You know, we can't just do it through resilience. We've also got to prevent water getting into those areas of the city where people live and work. There are about 1, 600 houses at the moment that are at risk of flooding in a one in a hundred year sort of scale event, and that will more than double over the next 50 years as a result of climate change, if the forecasts are correct.
And a big flood of that scale is something I think I can't do anything about at my household level. The water level is just going to be too big for us to be able to fend that off with floodgates and what have you. So, there's a lot can be done with resilience in, here in smaller scale events. That's definitely worth doing, but for very large scale flooding, you've got to do something else as well.
I suppose even for the smaller scale events, some of the things that we worked on with the Environment Agency in about 2010 through to 2013 were about intervening in the environment around here to prevent water going towards people's homes. So a very specific example, there's a major road coming in from the west into the city.
We had part of that road recontoured so that water flowed down a road into a retail park and then out through the back of that into fields beyond, rather than going down a couple of residential streets which were just next door to it and which used to take the main hit of the water. So a very simple exercise like that.
has meant that we've got a couple of streets that were very vulnerable to flooding and now being effectively protected by the road being re consoled. There's a fixed pump at the bottom of one of those roads that kicks in and which local residents actually kind of help to staff and operate. I think it's got to be a mix of protection and recovery sort of measures that you can do at a business or household level and wider things you've got to do in the environment that you're in to protect yourself against flooding as well.
I don't think they're an either or, they're both and getting the right combination. Is what you've got to aim for because you're not going to be able to protect everybody to an infinite degree. Even with this flood scheme in Oxford, some of the more vulnerable houses like where I live will still have some residual damage.
flood risk for very big events, but the scale of flooding we'd experience in those events would be much lower than we would if there wasn't a flood scheme. So we do have some chance that in those situations, our own local resilience measures might be enough to fend that off. But at the moment, without the flood scheme, we wouldn't be able to do that.
So it's always going to be a combination of the two things, I think, working together. And earlier, you mentioned the importance of different agencies working together. Do you think that is a core part of resilience? Is not just individual resilience, but agencies working together? Yeah, I think agencies working together is absolutely critical.
In 2007, the police had a very prominent role. They had a plan to evacuate. People from various streets that were underwater. But a lot of residents didn't want to move. Partly concerned about theft. The police were saying they didn't have the capacity to patrol the areas once people had moved out. But their kind of approach to the whole thing was very authoritarian.
It was like they treated those of us who didn't want to leave as though we were, not exactly criminals, but engaged in some kind of disruptive civil disobedience or something. You know, there was a lot of critical feedback about that at the time. And since then they've taken a very low rung. a profile role in the response to floods, which I think has been much better.
The Environment Agency, City Council now take the role. They have a plan which they follow where they divide up responsibilities. It all operates pretty smoothly and they're talking to each other all the time that it's happening. The Fire Brigade is brought in as extra backup as required. And without that coordination, I think, and recognition of the different responsibilities and where people can add value and where they don't, Don't particularly add value.
Um, there's been a really big learning and um, makes a big difference. So that was Simon from Oxford showing his thoughts on this episode's topic of resilience. Sarah, do you have any immediate reflections from that? I just think it's, it's really interesting. I think it's, I think it's really good to hear a community perspective as well, because I think all too often from an industry perspective, we're focused on what we think needs doing, and actually it's not.
necessarily that. We need to listen to the community and understand what they need as well. And I think what really struck me, especially at the beginning of what Simon was saying, was the fact that he was using we a lot. So it was that kind of collective, you know, we need to do this and we need to do that.
It wasn't just, Us as a community or the organizations or, you know, the agencies need to do this. It was that collective we which I think is really important. And I think as we heard from, from what he said, that collaboration between the likes of the EA and the local council, but also with the skills and knowledge that the community has.
the, the communities hold themselves and what they can do, you know, that's going to provide a much more effective response than if it was just solely the response of the Environment Agency or just the communities that were left on their own. Karen, how about you? Are you surprised by anything that Simon said or did it all fit in with your feelings towards resilience?
Yeah, totally in line with what Sarah's been saying. It's really interesting and starts to. illustrate what we've been talking about already and totally agree. I've just circled on the page as well this community narrative and from a research perspective for me it's about qualitative research and listening to community stories and understanding and getting that depth of understanding.
But you know we talked about the definition at the beginning It's been about more of an ability and Simon was talking about that as well, you know, managing the event in an effective way that anticipation that preparedness. I like the way Simon said that people know when to put things into place. And you hit all these kind of building blocks of resilience community level, the floodgates, the bricks, etc.
But also, you know, the limits there. That there were these interventions, they were bigger, they needed more resources. And he talked about the central role of the EA and now working with the city councils as well. Clearly that need for prevention, more protection of flooding and a need for a debate of what level of risk is tolerable at a householder level, community level.
There was the social ecological thinking in there as well, where we had the scheme that wasn't traditional flood defences. more about recontouring and working with nature. That was interesting. The positives of resilience that we talked about, you know, the, the change from 2007 when Simon talked about The authoritarian approach.
And now we've got this, as Sarah's really highlighting there, the effective interagency working, working in partnership. The community has almost been the eyes and ears for Castro Cuban responders. That's really positive. And you can imagine this almost being written up as a case study. In the strategy, you know, you know, what a fantastic case.
And it really is of community resilience, but I'd love to talk more and hear more from Simon to understand more about the social side of this, you know, what has gone on over the years, the power and the politics, how has this alliance really come about? Simon's clearly very knowledgeable, you know, and the other members of the Alliance, their abilities, their capacities, you know, what are their backgrounds, etc.
But then if you've got a community that isn't that empowered, how can you bring that about? So if you're working with Project Groundwater, looking to establish other flood groups and other alliances, you know, who leads? How do you target resources? How do you know how to build capacity? And how are you identifying communities?
are possibly going to be left behind like we're talking about, that they, they won't be building resilience like this and working in partnership because they just don't have this capacity. It's a huge undertaking. Yeah, I did think hearing it back, other than the horror of having to hear myself speak, how much they did, like this group of people, because the Oxford Blood Alliance, how much they had taken on and the work they'd done.
And it'd be interesting to know. Are they a group that has done this mostly by themselves because they experienced flooding and they wanted, they wanted it to be different? Or did they get support to have that? And those areas that we now have that are going to be at risk of flooding that were never at risk before, can we work with them before floods rather than after?
And do we have to wait until they, they bring it up, they bring up their need for support? Or can we go with them first? What also really struck me in his interview was I think he really showed the importance of the bouncing forward that we mentioned earlier because he kept on going back to, we learnt, we did this, we learnt, we did it again, we improved.
And I think that was something that, looking back, I was like, yeah, from what we've already spoken about, that's what resilience is to me now. It's not just putting in some plans, but actually it's saying, this went wrong, how do you do it differently? So, finally, I really want to think about, again, back to resilience.
And we've spoken, we've touched on this, on resilience a few times in the definitions. But we've also been clear that there isn't a clear definition. It is one of those terms that we tend to kind of use differently and use without really expanding upon it. Why do we think it matters that we don't have a clear definition?
Why did you write a paper about this definition and about this topic? What is the issue here? Sarah, I'll come to you first. Yeah, that's a good question actually, Katie. We're just really interested in this and the more we spoke about it, the more we realised that. We couldn't just through a few conversations, we couldn't get our heads around this.
So we needed to have that thinking time and that space to really delve into it and to really look at the different components. But I think the reason why it's needed is exactly like you said, Katie, resilience is this almost buzzword now, and everyone's throwing it about left, right and center saying we all need to be resilient and we're, you know, Projects have got objectives to be more resilient or to produce a resilient building or to provide resilience to a community and stuff like that.
But I think if we don't understand what that term actually means, then how can we ensure that communities are resilient? How can we ensure that our building is resilient? We run the risk. And I think it's almost like the term sustainability, like, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, where it was such a buzzword that everything was sustainable.
Everyone was doing sustainability, but no one actually could really say, well, yeah, I am truly sustainable, until it was kind of unpacked a bit more and people actually understood what sustainability meant. And I think we're almost there with resilience in the sense that You know, everyone wants to be resilient and everyone wants to use the word, but we just don't quite understand what it means.
And I think it runs the risk of us not providing resilience or, or not making something resilient or communities not being resilient because we don't really understand what it is. And therefore there's more opportunity for people to say, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've, we've done something that's resilient and we can't actually check it or we can't say for sure that it is resilient.
So I think until we actually understand what we mean by it. And I, and I think from what the research Karen and I have done, it is so complex that I don't think we're ever going to get that one term where it's like, ta da, this is what resilience means, dot, dot, dot. But I think what needs to be done is people need to understand almost the, the concept and the theory behind it and the thinking behind it so that they know what they need to do.
And they can say, yes, you know, we are helping a community become resilient or yes, that community is resilient, or more importantly. No, that community isn't resilient, therefore we need to help them. It's almost a understanding what we mean by it. And if we're going to use the term, then we obviously need to understand it.
But also by understanding what we mean by it, then we can make sure that we are actually doing it as a concept. It has been implemented or, you know, a community is resilient. We talked very early, didn't we? In a community and engagement meeting with a partnership. As to what do we mean by resilience? And we had quite similar definitions, but they were different.
They've focused on ability, but nevertheless, it was quite hazy as to what we actually meant. At the beginning, I felt that we needed to. come to a common definition so that we're all working together, that it was clear that we'd have a, almost like this common language and know and map out what was required to make communities more resilient.
But for Sarah and I, the big focus is on the, the social element, the community element, the need for engagement, and there's less. Much less attention on the ability or capacity of communities to become more resilient and the engagement is required there, you know, and what resources are required to build resilience.
So really interested from a social science perspective of looking more into that social capital and the learning and also. I'm not paying attention to issues of equality, but the more I think about it and it's still, you know, resilience still blows my mind, just get completely swallowed up in the level of literature.
I don't know, do we actually think that resilience, we understand that it's a very complex question. concept. We've all got different perspectives. We all come with different expertise, but what's perhaps more important is that we listen to each other. We understand that we shouldn't band this term around, that it is really complex.
It's also context specific as well. And I think in terms of groundwater, as Jed talks a lot, that groundwater is understudied. It's interesting, isn't it? That I think resilience. is more pertinent to groundwater because we can't defend about against it. So yes, keep pushing for this community approach and understanding how we work with communities, how we create the supportive environment, which is done very well in the health sector and pull up across a lot on that.
But keep questioning, you know, is the project, is it a push for communities to take more responsibility and ownership of risk? Or is it a push to develop those capacities and those abilities for us to work together in the longer term? And it is noted in the literature from the social science that really is that, putting the governance in place and the support that really ultimately affects communities capacity.
And for those who don't know, Jed is the project leader of Project Groundwater. So that brings us to a close, I think. I think those are some fantastic final thoughts from you, Karen. And I don't really think we can do any better than that as sort of an endpoint on the conversation of resilience. However, there is an option to continue the conversation if people want it.
Karen and Sarah are very happy to have feedback on their paper. Their paper is freely available. You'll be able to find it in our podcast notes and on our website. projectgroundwater. co. uk. So thank you to my guests, Dr. Karen Potter and Dr. Sarah Fitton, and of course the Simon Collings from the Oxford Flood Alliance, and thank you for listening to Groundwater Rising.
We're a new podcast looking to grow, so please hit the subscribe button on your podcast provider, leave us a review, and tell your friends and colleagues about us. That's all for now, we'll be back on the last Thursday of next month with another episode of Groundwater Rising.