Resilience as a Communicative Construct: Actor Interpretations and Risk Reflexivity in the Jabar Resilience Culture Province
Abstract
Resilience in disaster governance is increasingly understood as a communicative process shaped by interaction, interpretation, and everyday experience. This study investigates how actors across different governance layers construct the meaning of resilience within the Jabar Resilience Culture Province (JRCP) program in West Java, Indonesia an initiative introduced to strengthen preparedness in communities exposed to the Lembang Fault. Employing an interpretive qualitative methodology, data were gathered via 27 comprehensive interviews and focus group discussions involving provincial officials, technocratic agencies, volunteers, community organizations, and residents of the villages. Analysis followed meaning coding, multilayered actor mapping, and cross-layer synthesis informed by the Risk Society framework. Findings show that resilience is understood in divergent ways: provincial authorities frame JRCP as political commitment, technocratic bodies view it through procedures and indicators, volunteers locate it within social solidarity and community practice, while villagers articulate resilience through survival concerns, ecological knowledge, and spiritual reasoning. Emotional reactions, including feelings of disappointment, guilt, resistance, and cautious optimism, significantly influence these interpretative frameworks. Across layers, meanings circulate but do not converge, producing fragmented reflexivity that weakens JRCP’s coherence. The study argues that misaligned meaning is a central barrier to resilience policy effectiveness. Strengthening JRCP requires not only technical capacity but also communicative spaces that allow actors across layers to co-produce shared understandings of risk and resilience.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18415/ijmmu.v13i2.7298
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