WEBINAR: Dr Esther Carmen: A socio-cultural perspective for working with social relationships in community sustainability initiatives in practice: A focus on relationship qualities

Social capital is widely recognised as a critical resource within community sustainability initiatives and for enhancing community resilience more generally. This talk draws on three studies on social capital relating to community resilience and, more specially community-based sustainability initiatives.

First, a review of 187 community resilience and social capital studies is briefly presented that identifies limited attention (conceptually and empirically) on the socio-cultural dimensions (i.e. social norms, values, identities) of social capital in community resilience literature. Second, a study that explored the social dynamics involved in developing a community sustainability initiative (a community fridge in Scotland) is briefly presented. The findings show a connection between the socio-cultural dimensions of social relationships in a shaping (initially) a decrease and a subsequent increase in the quality of relationships as this initiative was implemented. Whilst important such socio-cultural dimensions however may be challenging to actively work with in practice. Instead, a focus on relationship qualities could provide new insights on the role of social relationship and how to better work through relationships within initiatives in practice.

To illustrate this a third study is briefly presented that explored different qualities of social relationships and their role across 22 diverse community sustainability initiatives in Scotland. Findings show that direct contributions and indirect benefits from social relationships were more diverse for some types of relationship qualities than others – and such diversity enhances flexibility. While a strong focus on expected benefits of social relationships and external barriers hindering the role of relationships was common, some initiatives adopted a more agentic approach that involved explicitly navigating their social landscape by selecting opportunities to build relationships based on quality. Prioritising quality has the advantage of avoiding expending excessive energy on social relationships that are likely to yield little whilst also channelling resources to maximise the role of social relationships within initiatives. The flexibility the application of such relationship-based strategies can (co)create is important for engaging with local sustainability challenges of increasing complexity.