Understandings and applications of rural community resilience amongst Scottish stakeholders: introducing dual discourses

This paper seeks to examine understandings and applications of rural community resilience. Scottish policy has shifted toward neoliberalism and community empowerment, with communities encouraged to play a proactive role in enhancing their own resilience. We argue that it is important to understand the perspectives of multiple stakeholders to identify what practical factors they believe enhance community resilience and to provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms through which community resilience can be delivered. Drawing on qualitative data collection, we question what resilience means and what factors can facilitate it in practice. We find that dual discourses of resilience emerge: the emergency which reflects the policy focus on short-term damage reduction, and the everyday which reflects the desire for more long-term adaptive capacities developing in response to gradual change in rural communities. We conclude that the discourse which stakeholders align with will affect how they understand, adopt, and practice the concept.