after the February 2011 earthquake, vouchers were provided to help build capability in earthquake affected businesses, business mentors were appointed to help them to bounce back, and Red Cross grants were available to help businesses to access legal, financial and engineering advice (EQ Recovery Learning, 2016).
Resilience takes place at multiple levels, individual, organizational and community, but few studies explore how the different levels interact (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003; Linnenluecke, 2017). In the context of the Canterbury earthquakes, Prayag et al. (2019b) showed that in small and medium tourism enterprises, the psychological resilience of owners and managers have an influence on employee resilience, which in turn positively impacts organizational resilience. They highlight that life satisfaction has a role to play post-disaster in building organizational resilience. This aligns with previous studies suggesting that a lack of resilience at one level can undermine resilience at other levels (Hall et al., 2018; Pizzo, 2015). Although research and policy highlight the need to understand human factors in determining adaptive capacity, these are seldom integrated in current disaster models and frameworks (Amore et al., 2018). Individual, family and community characteristics that build resilience, as part of the so-called healthy functioning adaptive systems that support them, are often reduced to minor factors affecting the recovery strategies of communities (Brown & Westaway, 2011). Nevertheless, a significant body of research exists around the resilience of individuals and the role of psychological capital in facilitating recovery from disasters but these have not been integrated adequately in current disaster management models. After disasters people need to believe that they have the personal resources to achieve goals such as rebuilding their homes and businesses, getting jobs and starting their lives again. The psychological key to rebounding is the effort to regain personal control. Disaster planning for tourism, should therefore provide pathways for allowing community members, including business owners or managers and employees to re-establish personal control (Reich, 2006) and facilitate the process of building psychological resilience. Luthans et al. (2006), for example, suggest that the resilience of employees can be developed through organizational interventions, for instance, by asking employees to identify personal setbacks within their work domain, to assess the realistic impact of their setback and to identify options for taking action. Resilience in this context is seen as a contributing factor towards employee psychological capital (Linnenluecke, 2017). However, there is an urgent need for studies examining psychological capital in tourism organizations and communities dependent on tourism (Hall et al., 2018; Prayag, 2018).
Resilience and sustainability
Resilience is usually used in the context of coping with change and responding to specific shocks and this relates to short-term survival and recovery (Rose, 2011). Sustainability revolves around long-term survival and improving the quality of life and the environment. In the tourism literature, there is considerable emphasis on resilience to immediate challenges but there is also merit in conceptualizing resilience as a dynamic long-term state, highlighting the obvious parallels with the concept of sustainability (Espiner et al., 2017). Both resilience and sustainability have been described as highly abstract and multifaceted concepts, each with a variety of definitions and interpretations (Derissen et al., 2011; Hall et al., 2018). Resilience is often viewed in normative terms as a need or commitment to become more resilient, similar to the concept of sustainability (Hall et al., 2018). Derissen et al. (2011) proposed four different potential relationships between the two concepts: resilience of a system is necessary but insufficient for sustainability, resilience of a system is sufficient but not necessary for sustainability, resilience of the system is neither necessary nor sufficient for sustainability and resilience of a system is both necessary and sufficient for sustainability. However, the capacity for organizations and destinations to be agile and adaptive in responding to rapid, unexpected change is one clear point of difference between the concepts of resilience and sustainability (Espiner et al., 2017).
Espiner et al. (2017) argue that systems can be resilient without being sustainable, while if a system is sustainable, it is implicitly assumed that it is resilient to change. Destinations cannot be sustainable if they are also not resilient (Espiner et al., 2017). This is particularly the case when destinations are hit by disasters. The initial focus is usually on rebuilding the ‘hard’ infrastructure such as roads, sewage and airports to enable locals to have access to amenities and social infrastructure. However, consideration must also be given to the long-term needs of the community and its ability to cope with other sudden as well as incremental change. Yet, consideration of social infrastructure related to health and wellbeing is often secondary, while the tourism industry often even fails to provide a living wage in many situations, with both of these factors (among others) having significant implications for both community and destination resilience and sustainability (Pizzo, 2015; Lew et al., 2016; Hall et al., 2018).
Different disasters require different spatial and time frames for policies and action (Pizzo, 2015). Though the two are not mutually exclusive, resilience studies in tourism seem to almost suggest that the same resilience building approach can be applied to every type of disaster. Also, resilience thinking often lacks depth in analysing the social dimension, including the political economy of resource and power distribution, and the consequences of uneven patterns of resource use over space and time (Miller et al., 2010). For example, although social capital is described as a positive resource that allows individuals and communities to cope and bounce back, social relationships and networks can also foster social exclusion in the rebuilding process, manifested through dominant power structures and historically embedded cultural norms. The dark side of social capital must be acknowledged. This was evident across the 2004 tsunami affected destinations in Thailand (Calgaro & Lloyd, 2008). In addition, many adaptive management strategies fail to be successfully implemented or bring about transformative changes due to existing governance structures (Folke et al., 2010). What appears to be a resilient structure can hold power structures, inequities and exclusion in a place that can create rigidity traps (Folke et al., 2010) and lead to substantial questions about the validity of any earthquake disaster responses.
Framework for the Book
As noted in the above discussion, the understanding of disasters can be framed in terms of planning or policy cycles and the response to hazard events (Hall, 2002, 2010; Gurwitch et al., 2004; Blakely, 2012; Hernantes et al., 2013; Thompson et al., 2017). This approach has been used to position the chapters in the present volume in terms of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, with the latter stage including aspects of rebuilding, redeveloping and renewal, as well as post-event planning which brings the process full circle but aiming to mitigate future events (Table 1.2). However, it should be noted that many aspects of these stages are not discrete and key concepts, such as social capital, communication and trust in institutions, run across all stages. Chapter 2 by Martini and Platania looks at how resilience and preparedness of tourism operators in Mount Etna is shaped by the experience of previous earthquake events, perception of risk and institutional trust and social capital. Some similar themes are picked up in Chapter 3 by Das and Chakrabarty in their discussion of communication systems and earthquake preparedness for the tourism sector in Nepal. Subadra (Chapter 4) examines the mitigation of earthquake and tsunami risk in coastal Bali and reinforces the importance of effective communication of risk and appropriate response to tourists.
Table 1.2 Major focus of chapters in relation to stages of disaster management cycle
Chapters 5 to 7 are primarily focused on the response to earthquakes. Chapter 5 by Amore examines the expectations and disillusionment of tourism-relevant stakeholders in Christchurch following the 2010–2011 earthquake sequence and how this affects the trajectory of postearthquake recovery. Chapter 6 by Morpeth discusses response in a more compressed time frame in discussing the implications of the role of tourism in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti. In Chapter 7 Hashimoto and Telfer provide a more extended coverage of tourism industry post-disaster response,
