A systematic literature review of community disaster resilience: main and related research areas and agendas

Abstract

PurposeThis study aims to characterize the main research areas of published works, identify the disciplines that associated with the works and propose research agendas for future inquiries, based on a systematic literature review that encompasses 89 research papers from 2010 to 2020.Design/methodology/approachThis review commenced with the definition of the three research questions, and subsequently three steps were followed: (1) defining criteria for research paper selection; (2) specifying the data bases and selecting the papers based on the criteria and (3) data analysis, conclusion and discussion of selected papers. The search was limited to the selection of research papers in English, focusing on “community disaster resilience” which is the subject of this review and referred to as keywords which were used for the online search for papers. All these three words must be present in the title of the selected papers.FindingsThe area “resilience management” and “disaster resilience assessment” accounted for 43% of the studies, and it indicates that research has emphasized the description of how community disaster resilience has been managed and assessed. Three disciplines relating to disaster resilience are disaster risk science, public health and environment, and it indicates that research has fostered core areas of community disaster resilience. Three key research agenda include a growing trend to describe successful efforts to avert a potentially catastrophic disaster through solution-based case studies; a paradigmatic shift and implementation of how communities could help the disaster victims recuperate from disasters.Research limitations/implicationsThis review is limited to the numbers of chosen papers, as only full papers were chosen. However, in order to establish more rigorous and inclusive results of the study, the numbers of citations of published papers to be chosen for future inquiry should be taken into account.Originality/valueThis present review originally investigated how the concept of disaster resilience has been applied at the community level and in related areas. As resilience is a multidisciplinary concept that has been investigated by several different disciplines, such as sustainability, psychology, economy and sociology, this study looked into how disciplines related to community disaster resilience to provide agenda for future inquiries. This study therefore characterized the main research areas of published works, identified the disciplines that associated with the works and proposed a research agenda for future inquiries.