CAREER: Transactive Resilience: Uncovering the Effects of Social Network and Communal Capacity on Disaster Community Resilience

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project seeks to examine disaster resilience via relationships among non-profits, community groups, government agencies, and built environment in disaster-affected communities. By better understanding of these relationships, it will shed light on how distributed or decentralized networks can bolster disaster resilience, resource allocation, and emergency management in high-risk regions by enabling intra-organizational and peer-to-peer interactions, rather than top-down responses. The project will further explore how efficiency and equity in disaster response may be improved by encouraging the participation of historically marginalized communities in the planning and response processes. Effective, efficient, and rapid distribution of information and resources is the foundation of disaster response and infrastructure resilience. It becomes even more prominent due to disasters’ increasing intensity and frequency in a changing climate. Traditional, hierarchical systems, though effective, tend to be less efficient and less rapid than other forms of distributed networks as they rely on longer, cumbersome communication chains for key information to reach key decision-makers and inform decisions and policies. Furthermore, vulnerable citizens and traditionally marginalized groups may be underrepresented in, and thus further excluded from, these disaster response and recovery modes. This research plans a revised model by defining, developing, and implementing a Transactive Resilience Model oriented around peer-to-peer connections among community organizations, non-profits, and government agencies. The project will explore these decentralized networks as a potential complement to traditional, linear response models via analysis of historical data, quantitative and qualitative assessment of practitioners, and subsequent interventions aimed at cultivating transactive resilience. This project is jointly funded by Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.