Role of Community in Natural and Economic Recoveries
Guest Editors: Norman Walzer (Northern Illinois University), Brent Hales (U of So. Mississippi) and James Calvin (Johns Hopkins University)
Recovering from both natural disasters and economic recessions have been major issues facing state and local policymakers, community leaders, and business owners in recent years. Natural disasters often bring economic setbacks as businesses close displacing employees who often move away to better economic opportunities. The most successful approaches, as in Katrina, involve the community banding together to identify new opportunities and investing time, effort, and funds to rebuild and/or revitalize the local business sector and economy. An essential element in the success is the ability of local leaders to engage all sectors of the community in addressing the issues.
Times of serious adversity stimulate decision-makers to find and implement new and innovative practices to address local situations. During these times of stress, new relationships are formed, social capital is built, and decision-makers are forced to experiment with policies and development approaches. After the disaster has been remedied, some of the innovative practices tried can be used in other situations and other places.
This Call for Papers requests contributions to a special issue of Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society on innovative approaches to recovering from natural and economic disasters. Papers on this topic were presented during the 2010 CDS/IACD annual conference in July. However, submissions are not limited to those presentations; instead, creative approaches to disaster recovery, especially those that engage the community in new and innovative ways are encouraged.
Sample topics might include, but are not limited to:
• innovative public/private financing approaches for housing and economic revitalization;
• new models and approaches used in disaster recovery strategies
• ways to evaluate community engagement initiatives and development processes
• gaining buy-in from private agencies and/or local public officials in development process
• enhancing citizen participation, cultural diversity, in formulating development policies
• involving youth, immigrants, and retirees in development in a changing volunteer force
• building stronger community collaboration and public/private partnerships
• using special groups e.g. faith-based organizations in rehabilitation and development
• fostering overall community resiliency including eco-system services
• promoting green industries and bio-fuels as new community investment opportunities
• regional approaches to rehabilitation, revitalization, and /or redevelopment
• international approaches, methods and perspectives on recovery and revitalization
(This list is not exhaustive and does not preclude other topics.)
The abstracts should not be a case study of a single community unless the lessons learned and outcomes are easily scalable and replicable. The abstracts should do more than describe current programs; rather, they must review the literature, document the redevelopment process, and evaluate the outcomes showing community enhancement and change. The evaluation should be quantitative based surveys, changes in community characteristics, successful programs implemented, evaluations, and/or related measures that identify key factors contributing to successes.
Selected papers will be refereed and published in an upcoming special issue of Community Development: Journal of the CDS. If interested in contributing, please send an abstract, not longer than 500 words outlining the topics to be addressed, methodologies used, and how the paper will contribute to the topic of the special issue to: Norman Walzer (nwalzer@niu.edu) by October 30, 2010. When submitting, include DISASTER and ECONOMIC RECOVERY PAPER in the subject line of the e-mail. Authors will be notified by November 30, 2010 as to whether they will be invited to prepare a full paper.
