O'Grady Nathaniel, Shaw Duncan, Parzniewski Szymon
Human Geography and Disaster, Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom.
Operational Research and Critical Systems, Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Manchester M1 3BB, United Kingdom.
Geoforum. 2022 Jun;132:32-41. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Apr 8.
How has the idea of community featured in attempts to build resilience to emergencies? The paper explores this question by presenting evidence from interviews with emergency responders across the world in the midst of the early and uncertain phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although reflecting different contexts, we discern two ways in which the notion of community featured in authorities' narrations of their efforts to respond to the pandemic. Firstly, we demonstrate how community was deployed as a discursive mechanism that offered a particular framing of the vulnerabilities the pandemic instigated. Departing from accounts that reduce people's identities to demographic categories, the deployment of community stressed that the pandemic's effects should be understood by the different, yet coexistent, vulnerabilities it brought to the surface for people. Such renditions of vulnerability paved the way for styles of governance that prioritised adapting to the pandemic's uncertain and indeterminate unfolding in the absence of prepared plans. Secondly, addressing a register of collective social life between individuals and the state, an emphasis on community engendered the decentralised arrangement of emergency governance with which resilience has become synonymous. Here, community proved pivotal in temporarily expanding resources to deal with an emergency whose effects threatened to exceed governments' pre-existing capabilities. We substantiate this claim through examining how allusions to community worked to enrol non-state based efforts at response into a broader public security apparatus. Enveloped within the broader politics of emergency resilience, community shaped how the pandemic's effects were understood whilst also ensuring adequate provisions for its governance.
在增强应对突发事件的恢复力的努力中，社区理念是如何体现的？本文通过展示在新冠疫情早期和不确定阶段对全球应急响应人员的访谈证据来探讨这个问题。尽管反映了不同的背景，但我们发现社区概念在当局应对疫情努力的叙述中有两种体现方式。首先，我们展示了社区是如何作为一种话语机制被运用的，这种机制对疫情引发的脆弱性提供了一种特定的框架。与那些将人们的身份简化为人口统计类别的说法不同，社区的运用强调，疫情的影响应该从它为人们所揭示的不同但又共存的脆弱性角度来理解。这种对脆弱性的阐释为治理方式铺平了道路，即在没有预先制定计划的情况下，优先适应疫情不确定和难以预测的发展态势。其次，在涉及个人与国家之间集体社会生活的层面上，对社区的强调催生了应急治理的分散化安排，而恢复力已成为这种安排的代名词。在这里，社区被证明在临时扩充资源以应对一场其影响可能超出政府现有能力的紧急情况方面起着关键作用。我们通过考察对社区的提及是如何将基于非国家行为体的应对努力纳入更广泛的公共安全体系来证实这一观点。在更广泛的应急恢复力政治背景下，社区塑造了人们对疫情影响的理解方式，同时也确保了对其治理的充分准备。
