Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Geography
First Advisor
Susan L. Cutter
Abstract
Resilience is a broad and complex concept used in both research and practical applications to understand how places can recover from, adapt to, and reduce vulnerability to hazard events and long-term changes. In addition, resilience is place-based, formed through social, economic, community, infrastructural, environmental, and institutional conditions that vary over space. Measuring resilience’s variation over time and in different places is important to understanding how contextual and actionable conditions interact. Resilience practitioners must track progress, identify effective interventions, and inform future decision-making. This dissertation addresses the gap between resilience metrics in research and practice through three distinct chapters. The first calculates an established resilience metric, the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) index, over three time periods and conducts a longitudinal analysis to determine the drivers of resilience from 2010 through 2020. This chapter contributes a new iteration of BRIC and finds that counties with low resilience remain low over time, even though resilience generally increases, and that actionable indicators predict BRIC changes more than contextual indicators. The second chapter adopts a local and practical approach to resilience metric development, co-producing a customized BRIC for South Carolina in collaboration with the state’s Office of Resilience. The resulting index reflects local and actionable resilience priorities for the state, which can then be analyzed using methods and best practices from the first chapter. The third and final chapter expands our understanding of the practitioner’s perspective on resilience measurement and metric development. Through interviews with state and local resilience practitioners around the United States, this chapter establishes a baseline understanding of the various approaches to resilience-building and priority-setting for resilience institutions across the country. In addition, the chapter introduces a resilience metric maturity rubric that is used to compare the resilience measurement methods used in practice, finding that most places have not developed integrated metrics to inform decision-making. These three chapters address research and practical questions around the process of measuring the complex concept of resilience and how researchers can pilot and co-produce metrics to inform resilience-building practice. I conclude by identifying future research opportunities within this same research-practitioner nexus to continue to build resilience effectively.
Rights
© 2025, Margot Habets
Recommended Citation
Habets, M.(2025). Incorporating Temporality and Place in Actionable Resilience Metrics. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8495