Abstract
Community resilience, as another type of resilience, is considered an important tool to link governance leadership and communities’ capabilities to deal with uncertainty. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governmental services shifted due to changing priorities and population needs. These changes made some services, long considered as non-essential, the first line of response for service delivery. Case in point, the vast array of senior services that normally were considered a lower priority when engaging in strategic and budgetary planning, as it became evident that older adults were amongst the most vulnerable groups to the disease. Such changes required adaptation to external circumstances and changes to already defined by strategic priorities.
These dynamics created the need to reassessment said priorities and to reorganize resources. As a result, community resilience was tested by the pandemic’s effects. Patel et al. (2017) explained that while there is no common or agreed definition of community resilience, the authors identified “three general types of definition: 1) ‘process’ definitions (i.e. an ongoing process of change and adaptation); 2) ‘absence of adverse effect’ definitions (i.e. an ability to maintain stable functioning); and 3) ‘range of attributes’ definitions (i.e. a broad collection of response related abilities)” (p. 7).
This paper main objective is to illustrate examples of community resilience and changes in governance by analyzing local governments’ actions in Southern California. The authors of this paper aim to use original qualitative data through interviews with local leaders and middle managers responsible for the change and adaptation in various cities in Southern California. The idea is to provide information that helps further define community resilience and the role that external factors play in local governments’ responses to externalities (in the philosophical sense).