Community Capacity and Resilience in Latin America

Community Capacity and Resilience in Latin America addresses the role of communities in building their capacity to increase resiliency and carry out rural development strategies in Latin America. Resiliency in a community sense is associated with an ability to address stress and respond to shock while obtaining participatory engagement in community assessment, planning and outcome. Although the political contexts for community development have changed dramatically in a number of Latin American countries in recent years, there are growing opportunities and examples of communities working together to address common problems and improve collective quality of life.

This book links scholarship that highlights community development praxis using new frameworks to understand the potential for community capacity and resiliency. By rejecting old linear models of development, based on technology transfer and diffusion of technology, many communities in Latin America have built capacity of their capital assets to become more resilient and adapt positively to change. This book is an essential resource for academics and practitioners of rural development, demonstrating that there is much we can learn from the skills of self-diagnosis and building on existing assets to enhance community capitals.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Paul R. Lachapelle is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Montana State University-Bozeman, USA. His teaching and research spans many disciplines and practices, from community climate change resiliency to social impact investing to diversity, inclusion and social justice topics. His publications include the edited book in this current series, Addressing Climate Change at the Community Level (Routledge 2019) as well as journal articles on energy impacts in communities, democratic practice and local governance, and community visioning. He earned a Ph.D. (Forestry) at the University of Montana's College of Forestry and Conservation with a focus on natural resource policy and governance and serves as Editor of the Community Development Society Current Issues Book Series and member of the Board of Directors (and past-president) of the International Association for Community Development.

Isabel Gutierrez-Montes is Colombian Biologist (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), with a master’s degree in Natural Resources from CATIE and a Ph.D. in Rural Sociology from Iowa State University. Isabel works in Mesoamerica and South America using qualitative research methods as a diagnostic and planning tool in landscape management, assessment of vulnerability, implementation of farmer field schools, and socioenvironmental educational programs. She currently is the dean of CATIE (Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) graduate school. In the past she has been the academic coordinator of the Environmental Socioeconomics Master’s Program, Coordinator and Leader of the Mesoamerican Agroenvironmental Program (MAP) and Director of the Development and Conservation Academic Program (PAPDC) at CATIE, Costa Rica. In the academic field, she has been a principal advisor for the Ph.D. theses of three students and served on Ph.D. thesis committees for two students, as well as major professor for the master’s theses of 46 students and master’s thesis committees of 35 students. She has published books, book chapters and technical and scientific articles in English and Spanish.

Cornelia Butler Flora is Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Iowa State University and research professor at Kansas State University. Her doctorate is from Cornell University, specializing in the sociology of development and population studies. She served as Director of the Population Research Laboratory at Kansas State University, Chair of the technical committee of the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, Head of the Department of Sociology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development. She served as member of the board of directors of Consortium for Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion and Winrock International and served as past president of the Rural Sociological Society, the Community Development Society and the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. She has been consultant for international organizations and foundations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the United States and Canada. Her primary research interests are the intersections of human communities and agro-ecosystems and sustainable intensification in the context of climate change, with an emphasis on gender. She has taught courses and done research on rural development in Spain (as a Fulbright Professor) and Uruguay (including periods as a Fulbright Professor) as well as Argentina and Peru.