Building community resilience within involuntary displacements by enhancing collaboration between host and displaced communities: A literature synthesis

Improving resilience through empowerment of communities is becoming a much sought after
strategy for community level disaster preparedness. Community resilience is the ability of a
community to bounce back to its operational equilibrium after a hazardous stress. This ability
builds up over time based on many underlying factors such as community’s age distribution,
food supply, livelihood, population stability, indigenous knowledge, and communication
capacity. Often, these factors make communities different from one another and define their
level of resilience to disasters and other hazardous stresses.
Involuntary relocations alter the equilibrium position and stress absorbing ability of a
community by merging two (or more) communities with different resilience equilibrium
positions. In this case, resilience of these communities towards potential disasters could be
disturbed. Therefore, when involuntary relocations are to be exercised, maximising the potential
and collaboration of the communities is essential to enhance the overall resilience of the
communities involved. Accordingly, this paper aims to develop a conceptual model to integrate
possible mechanisms to build community resilience within involuntary settlements by
enhancing collaboration between host community and displaced community.
This study was conducted through a comprehensive literature review to investigate the research
question: ‘How involuntary settlements alter the resilience of the communities in Sri Lanka?’ It
has been found that the operational equilibrium of host and displaced communities would make
a shift immediately after relocation, because introduction of a new community will alter the
context of all the influencing factors of a community’s resilience. That shift would also be
higher for the displaced community compared to the host community.