Re-conceptualizing community in risk research

Community is an important concept for determining the factors that influence peoples’ perceptions of and actions surrounding risk. However, there are multiple and conflicting definitions for the concept of community and scholars operationalize it in various ways. In this paper, we argue for a renewed focus on community as a guiding consideration in discussions of risk management and the related concepts of resilience, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity. We outline classic and current conceptions of community to articulate how its conceptualization in ongoing risk research might lead to different outcomes, foci, or recommendations about collective adaptation. This includes a discussion of how historic and emerging methodological approaches for studying risk make implicit choices about what community is or how it influences collective response. We close by providing a set of potential axioms that can help researchers better integrate the complexity of community into studies of risk and understand how popu...