By Jan Verlin, Chair in Geopolitics of Risk, Ecole Normale Supérieure
What makes people self-organize to give first aid to victims of an active shooter? Why do people share their houses with others who lost their homes in an earthquake? Who volunteers for searching bodies after a flood? And how can first responders and authorities encourage this spontaneous solidarity between citizens rather than limiting it. ENGAGE wants to understand the potential of spontaneous self-organization of society during a crisis.
ENGAGE is a European funded research project for identifying solutions to improve societal resilience. Our part in this endeavour is to provide and analyse data on what citizens actually did to cope with a crisis to enhance societal resilience by examining closely eight different historical case studies: The Aquila earthquake of 2009, the Utøya terror attack, the Swedish wildfires of 2018, the Tōhoku Tsunami of 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear accident of 2011, the Negev flash floods of 2018, the Thalys train attack of 2015 and the Covid-19 pandemic. These case studies were chosen to highlight a variety of crisis situations ranging from terrorist attacks to industrial accidents to “natural” disasters like earthquakes, wildfires or flash floods including both large scale events and localized tragedies. We study official reports, scientific articles and conduct interviews and focus groups to understand the actions of citizens, but also the specific social context in which they take place. The goal of this survey of grassroots experiences is to take seriously what people say made them act.
To do so we first mapped social actors who engaged in “coping actions” before, during and after these historical crises. By “coping actions” we understand “resilience” not as a passive, latent ability of a group to “bounce back” after a disruption, but as a set of actions actively transforming a disaster situation by influencing individuals, social groups or a given society as a whole. Individuals or groups undertake such actions because they believe they contribute to overcome and cope with the crisis at hand.
In a second step, we understood “coping actions” as situated. In other words, we showed that these “coping actions” are rooted in society in the sense that they are enabled not only by material conditions, but also by discourses and representations of the event itself and of the social roles citizens identify with during a crisis. What people do during a crisis to overcome its effects is situated both in a larger social context and in the specific setting the crisis disrupts. Individuals and organizations act because they are attached to certain communities and involved in specific social groups. They identify themselves with certain values or beliefs in certain ideologies.
Our preliminary findings show that specific professional skills as well as membership in certain social groups make it more likely that people self-organize. Medical professions and politically active citizens are among those who enhance the resilience of their communities. Community norms around gender roles (e.g., “caregivers” and “heroes”) are another contextual aspect that is particularly relevant for successfully dealing with a disaster as well as specific cultural belief systems. Whereas a lot of studies insist for example on trust in authorities as determining factor for successfully building resilience, we can also show how constructive mistrust in authorities is more efficient in some contexts.
To conclude, these contextual aspects help us to identify “target aspects” that should be integrated in solutions that want to enhance societal resilience. For this reason, we develop a comprehensive model that help authorities and first responders to be context sensitive by understanding how citizen’s actions during a crisis are localized in specific social bonds and values. We placed the contextual aspects from each of our cases on a continuum ranging from those that can and should not be targeted for enhancing societal resilience to target aspects that can be influenced by the type of solutions ENGAGE wants to propose. We also situated aspects on a second continuum measuring the level of generalizablility. This enables us to distinguish between aspects that are rooted in the structure of society from those that are enacted in a given crisis situation. Whereas specific roles may be assigned by gender to citizens in a crisis, the way these roles are enacted in a specific situation may differ considerably. Also, awareness of certain risks does not necessarily translate into situational awareness.
The position of each aspect depends on the specific case that is modelized. Thus, this model enables us to assess the conditions of societal resilience and compare the different case studies without losing the specific characteristics of each case.