ABSTRACT
The topic of this contribution is the efforts at building resilience in New York City in the post-Sandy era. A special emphasis is on the role played by civil society actors in the different resilience plans and practices. In order to analyse this role a theoretical framework called ‘the interactionism approach’ was constructed building on a model depicting levels and scopes of actor involvement developed by Hoff & Gausset (2016), and the idea of a ‘resilience cycle’ developed by Nikpour and Lendal (2016) making it possible to analyse barriers to resilience at different levels. Using this theoretical framework, I find that the New York City resiliency plans do not move decisively beyond the ‘consultation’ type of actor involvement. Looking more specifically at actions/processes, we see that even though a lot of attention is given to local communities, including their businesses, etc. this has not resulted in a real delegation of more responsibilities to these communities or in more and better facilitation of citizen-driven initiatives. This was seen as a barrier to resilience building in New York City at the system level. Other barriers to involvement of civil society actors were found to be – at the agency level – the inequity in access to different kind of resources, economic as well as political, among individuals and communities. Such inequity gives rise to different levels of vulnerability in different areas of the city. At the institutional level, the biggest barriers to resilience building were found to be that there is too little real support for community-based groups and too little facilitation of citizen-driven initiatives. The community boards also seem to have too few competencies and resources to be able to act as an important force in (local) resilience building. Finally, at the system level the lack of delegation of responsibilities and facilitation of citizen-driven initiatives is a barrier. In addition, one can point to a (local) political economy as a barrier, as it creates huge differences in incomes and wealth, which diminishes the capacities of both individuals and communities to build resilience both for themselves and for their communities.
