Community wellbeing: applications for a disaster context
This paper explored how community wellbeing provides a broader means to understand disaster effects and outcomes, recognizing that the cultural and social history and the future of a community are more than just its experiences of disasters.
The concept of resilience has become a guiding principle for preparedness, management and recovery. Focusing on the wellbeing of a community, beyond its disaster experience, affords the potential for empowerment and self-reflection through a strengths-based lens. This provides a richer description of context than is gained by only using a resilience framework, which references the community assessment specifically to disaster preparedness and response. T
his link between the theory and application of measures of wellbeing and resilience at a community level has only very recently been recognized. The potential is clear for researchers to integrate resilience and wellbeing to produce research that makes a significant contribution to both the literature and to communities; particularly in a disaster context.
Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Volume 30, Number 4, July 2015, Pages 20-24. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attirbution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.