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This paper studies how the relations between nature and society are constructed in disaster governance frameworks. Dominant disaster governance frameworks present nature and society as separate realms, and the organisation of society is increasingly seen as the key cause of hazards and disasters. Disaster impacts are similarly framed around adverse societal consequences, while other-than-human nature is merely the background across which disasters unfold, as property lost, or a means of disaster governance. Although the centrality of human impacts is troubled when biodiversity or a disaster flagship species is threatened, neither situation challenges the nature-society dualism embedded in dominant disaster governance frameworks. The attention and resources of disaster governance target the societal side of nature-society dualism. This study finds, though, that in peripheries characterised by remoteness from centres of power, a sparse human population, and large spaces of other-than-human nature, the vulnerabilities facing humans and other-than-human nature risk being ungoverned.

Objective: This scoping review investigates the status of research focusing on the nexu of community action, climate change, and health and wellbeing in anglophone Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

Methods: This review was guided by Arksey and O’Malley framework and utilized the PRISMA-ScR checklist. We searched Medline/OVID, PsychInfo, VHL, Sociological Abstracts, Google Scholar, and Scopus to capture interdisciplinary studies published from 1946 to 2021.

Results: The search yielded 3,828 records of which fourteen studies met the eligibility criteria. The analysis assessed study aim, geographic focus, community stakeholders, community action, climate perspective, health impact, as well as dimensions including resources/assets, education/information, organization and governance, innovation and flexibility, and efficacy and agency. Nearly all studies were case studies using mixed method approaches involving qualitative and quantitative data. Community groups organized around focal areas related to fishing, farming, food security, conservation, and the environment.

Conclusion: Despite the bearing these areas have on public health, few studies explicitly examine direct links between health and climate change. Research dedicated to the nexus of community action, climate change, and health in the anglophone Caribbean warrants further study.

This chapter surveys how climate change affects humanitarian action. Humanitarian actors respond to disasters and support those affected by them. This chapter defines climate change and unpicks to what extent disasters are related to climate change, what causes climate change and how it impacts on and is addressed by humanitarian actors. It addresses to what extent disasters, conflict, and forced migration are caused by climate change and provides an overview of how humanitarian actors have responded to these challenges. The chapter discusses that different regions and populations are differently affected by climate change and that inequalities in access to humanitarian aid can be noticed. After defining humanitarianism and climate change, this chapter examines three areas of humanitarian intervention: disasters, conflict, and migration. Throughout, the chapter considers how in the context of humanitarianism and climate change, inequalities matter, persist, and are perpetuated.

Community groups are taking initiatives to adapt to a changing climate. These organizations differ from businesses and governments by being non-profit, often informal, resource limited, and reliant on volunteer labor. How these organizations facilitate collective action is not well known, especially since they do not necessarily solve common pool resource governance, but rather improve common pool resources through collective action. In fact, at first glance, community groups seem to not have the means for solving collective action problems used routinely in industry and government, such as paying people for cooperation or punishing them for lack of it.This article investigates how community groups solve collective action problems though data gathered across 25 organizations in three sites - Sitka, Alaska, USA; Toco, Trinidad; and a global site of distributed citizen science organizations. We found that community groups used positive reinforcement methods common to industry and used little punishment. Groups also engaged in mechanisms for collective action, such as relying on altruistic contributions by few individuals, that generally are not considered commonplace in businesses and governments. We conclude by discussing implications from this study for collective action theory and for how policymakers might learn from community groups to address climate change.

The concepts “resilience” and “community” appear frequently in research on disasters associated with major society-shaping phenomena such as climate change or urbanization. The chapter seeks to explicate how social science research conceptualizes the resilient community, building on a descriptive overview of disaster studies and climate change adaptation literature. Furthermore, the chapter explores how different conceptualizations of the resilient community frame social futures amid disasters. Three key conceptualizations of resilient community arise from the literature: (i) resilient community of belonging, (ii) resilient community of practice, and (iii) resilient community as an object of governance. Patterns arising across these conceptualizations resonate with previous critiques on how a focus on resilience and communities can serve to suppress the ideas and practices of the social, in line with neoliberal politics. Yet the conceptualizations are not univocally compatible with neoliberalism and can point to a variety of social futures. Conceptualizations of the resilient community can draw attention to the self-organizing of communities, as well as illustrate how a civil society mobilizes around a cause. Ideally, the cause is in line with the interests of the disaster-affected people, who typically are also marginalized in and across societies.

Little is known on how community-based responses to planetary health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can integrate concerns about livelihoods, equity, health, wellbeing, and the environment. We used a translocal learning approach to co-develop insights on community-based responses to complex health and environmental and economic crises with leaders from five organisations working with communities at the front line of intersecting planetary health challenges in Finland, India, Kenya, Peru, and the USA. Translocal learning supports collective knowledge production across different localities in ways that value local perspectives but transcend national boundaries. There were three main findings from the translocal learning process. First, thanks to their proximity to the communities they served, community-based organisations (CBOs) can quickly identify the ways in which COVID-19 might worsen existing social and health inequities. Second, localised CBO actions are key to supporting communities with unique challenges in the face of systemic planetary health crises. Third, CBOs can develop rights-based, ecologically-minded actions responding to local priorities and mobilising available resources. Our findings show how solutions to planetary health might come from small-scale community initiatives that are well connected within and across contexts. Locally-focused globally-aware actions should be harnessed through greater recognition, funding, and networking opportunities. Globally, planetary health initiatives should be supported by applying the principles of subsidiarity and translocalism.

Purpose: The neoliberal resilience discourse and its critiques both contribute to its hegemony, obscuring alternative discourses in the context of risk and uncertainties. Drawing from the "ontology of potentiality", the authors suggest reclaiming "resilience" through situated accounts of the connected and relational every day from the global south. To explore alternate possibilities, the authors draw attention to the social ontology of disaster resilience that foregrounds relationality, intersectionality and situated knowledge.

Design/methodology/approach: Quilting together the field work experiences in India, Indonesia, Nepal, Chile and Andean territories, the authors interrogate the social ontologies and politics of resilience in disaster studies in these contexts through six vignettes. Quilting, as a research methodology, weaves together various individual fragments involving their specific materialities, situated knowledge, layered temporalities, affects and memories. The authors' six vignettes discuss the use, politicisation and resistance to resilience in the aftermath of disasters.

Findings: While the pieces do not try to bring out a single "truth", the authors argue that firstly, the vignettes provide non-Western conceptualisations of resilience, and attempts to provincialise externally imposed notions of resilience. Secondly, they draw attention to social ontology of resilience as the examples underscores the intersubjectivity of disaster experiences, the relational reaching out to communities and significant others.

Originality/value: Drawing from in-depth research conducted in six disaster contexts by seven scholars from South Asia, South America and Northern Europe, the authors embrace pluralist situated knowledge, and cross-cultural/language co-authoring. Thus, the co-authored piece contributes to diversifying disaster studies scholarship methodologically.

The health impacts of climate change are distributed inequitably, with marginalized communities typically facing the direst consequences. However, the concerns of the marginalized remain comparatively invisible in research, policy and practice. Participatory action research (PAR) has the potential to centre these concerns, but due to unequal power relations among research participants, the approaches often fall short of their emancipatory ideals. To unpack how power influences the dynamics of representation in PAR, this paper presents an analytical framework using the metaphor of ‘puppeteering’. Puppeteering is a metaphor for how a researcher-activist resonates and catalyses both the voices (ventriloquism) and actions (marionetting) of a marginalized community. Two questions and continuums are central to the framework. First, who and where the puppeteer is (insider and outsider agents). Second, what puppeteering is (action and research; radical and managerial). Examples from climate change and health research provide illustrations and contextualizations throughout. A key complication for applying PAR to address the health impacts of climate change is that for marginalized communities, climate change typically remains a few layers removed from the determinants of health. The community’s priorities may be at odds with a research and action agenda framed in terms of climate change and health.