1. Resilience as ‘Ordinary Magic’: A
Transformational Approach to
Community Resilience
Professor Keith Shaw
Northumbria University
Newcastle
UK

2. My Background
• Political scientist relatively new to research on
resilience
• Research for UK Government on regenerating poor
communities and on the importance of
empowerment
• Published on: Local resilience and climate change:
Resilient organizations: A strategic approach to local
resilience (in a UK context)
• As resilience is debated within social sciences, a
critical literature is emerging

3. Community Resilience
• Allows for an integrated focus across disciplines and
policy sectors
• It is well-suited to many of the challenges facing
poorer communities
• On the ground, it is a more meaningful and less
problematic term than sustainability
• Allows for a focus on a more radical agenda: one
that adresses issues of social and environmental
justice

4. Three Reflections on Community Resilience
• Reframing Resilience as a Transformational Agenda
• Re-emphasising human agency: identifying the
importance of individuals, their social capital and
wider community assets
• Devolving power and encouraging local diversity:
allowing creativity and innovation to flow from the
bottom-up

5. 1. Reframing Resilience as Transformation
• Bouncing forward not back, transformation not a
return to the status quo
• Transformation for what ? values of fairness,
social justice, equity
• Its about innovation, creativity, intuition, risk-
taking
e.g. Transition Towns Movement

6. The Transition Towns
Movement: Totnes UK
• Housing (co-housing; eco-homes;
community-land-trust)
• Community ownership of economic
resources
• Renewable Energy (Community Wind
Farm)
• Garden Share/Incredible Edibles
• Skill-shares
• Local Currency (The Totnes Pound)
• Learning across the UK and Europe
Resilience is not collapsing at the
first sight of oil or food shortages’
and adapting to disturbances by
‘rebuilding local agriculture and
food production, localising energy
production, rethinking
healthcare, rediscovering local
building materials in the context
of zero energy building, and
rethinking how waste is managed.
To build the town's resilience,
that is, its ability to withstand
shocks from the outside, through
being more self reliant in areas
such as food, energy, health care,
jobs and economics.

7. 2. Human Agency Matters: Understanding
Communities
• Systems, Structures and Strategies can reduce
individuals to aggregates, variables or a statistic
• Need to capture voices, narratives, stories : how do we
do that ?
• Community assets and social capital integral to resilience
• Generic category of `The community` downplays both
diversity and the distinctiveness of place which are
crucial for developing resilience
• Avoiding the `heroic`: we all have the ability to be
resilient

8. Resilience as Ordinary Magic
‘What began as a quest to understand the
extraordinary has revealed the power of the
ordinary. Resiliency does not come from rare and
special qualities, but from the everyday magic of
ordinary … minds, brains, and bodies of children, in
their families and relationships, and in their
communities. (Masten (2001)

9. 3. Community Resilience cannot be imposed
from outside - it must start from within
• ‘Creating resilience is up to you. No one
is going to do it for you. No experts can
say exactly how it should be done in
your community. You are the experts
on what you think will work in the
places and with the people you know
best. It will take courage to ask big,
difficult questions. It will take creativity
to use our assets in new ways. It will
take compassion and time to build
communication, trust, and solidarity
between all members of our
communities, some of whom may
come from very different backgrounds
and traditions. Hopefully, it also will be
inspiring and often fun’ (Bay Localize)
• Too centralised and too managerial
• Cluttered Governance
• Restriction of local innovation
• State can undermine social capital
But…
• No community can, or should try, to
‘go it alone’: there is a key enabling
role for public bodies or other
agencies
• Facilitating not commanding:
encouraged to take risks/not afraid
to fail
• Scaling-up not down

10. The Big Green Challenge
(NESTA)
• One of the Winners (£300,000) was Green
Valleys, a community interest company based in
the Brecon Beacons in Wales. The Green Valleys
hope to reduce carbon emissions, mitigate the
risks of flooding and provide local residents with
cheap, renewable energy. Through hydro, wind
and thermal power (some of which is
community-owned), Green Valleys is hoping to
make the 520sq mile area ‘energy independent’.
Excess energy will be sold back to the National
Grid, generating a steady income stream for the
company.
- Mass Localism: a way to help small
communities solve big problems
- Instead of assuming that the best- Instead of assuming that the best
solutions need to be determined,solutions need to be determined,
prescribed, driven or ‘authorised’ fromprescribed, driven or ‘authorised’ from
the centre, policymakers should createthe centre, policymakers should create
more opportunities for communitiesmore opportunities for communities
to develop and deliver their ownto develop and deliver their own
solutions and to learn from eachsolutions and to learn from each
other’other’
- £1 million challenge prize designed to
stimulate and support community-led
responses to climate change.
- Prizes and public challenges can be
an effective means of distributing
funds and incentivising innovation

11. Summary
• To be resilient a number of factors need to
come together:
‘the right systems and structures, the right
technologies and information, the right kind
of community empowerment, and the right
values and habits of mind’. (Zolli and Healey,
2012)

12. Last Word (s)
• ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has’.
(Margaret Mead)