1 Rethinking Community Resilience to Climate Change: Does a Social Capital

This paper explores key concepts of resilience, vulnerability and social capital in the context of communities vulnerable to climate change, using a case study of rural Bangladesh. The case study focuses on two coastal communities in South-West Bangladesh, which involved largely qualitative analysis in order to capture the richness of how social capital is expressed and experienced and its relationship with resilience for climate change. This detailed community level study involved observation of household activities, group semi-structured interviews and household semi-structured interviews; this grassroots study was supplemented with a broad range of semi-structured interviews with local NGOs, international, governmental and research based organisations. This paper provides an understanding of the variables and relationships that determine community resilience to climate change, in particular, examining the links between social capital and community resilience. Do the existing theoretical frameworks for understanding social capital and resilience to climate change stand up to such an extreme context? The findings offer a critique of the simplistic assumptions made about ‘community’ highlighting the uneven power relations at the community level. It specifically, examines how the internal exchange system works in these communities, focusing on micro credit; highlighting the barriers that exist for vulnerable groups in accessing credit as a mechanism to move towards livelihood resilience; identifying the winners and losers in adaptation to climate change