Governing resilience building in Thailand's tourism-dependent coastal communities: Conceptualising stakeholder agency in social–ecological systems

In current scientific efforts to harness complementarity between resilience and vulnerability theory, one response is an ‘epistemological shift’ towards an evolutionary, learning based conception of the ‘systems-actor’ relation in social–ecological systems. In this paper, we contribute to this movement regarding the conception of stakeholder agency within social–ecological systems. We examine primary evidence from the governance of post-disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts in Thailand's coastal tourism-dependent communities following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Through an emerging storyline from stakeholders, we construct a new framework for conceptualising stakeholder agency in social–ecological systems, which positions the notion of resilience within a conception of governance as a negotiated normative process. We conclude that if resilience theory is proposed as the preferred approach by which disaster risk reduction is framed and implemented, it needs to acknowledge much more explicitly the role of stakeholder agency and the processes through which legitimate visions of resilience are generated.

Research highlights▶ Stakeholder agency at the interface of formal and informal institutions was the main determinant of resilience building in Thailand's tourism-dependent coastal communities after the 2004 tsunami. ▶ Collective and sustainable recovery and disaster risk reduction, which is deemed morally acceptable and lead to desired outcomes, depend on mediation between competing scenarios of desirable unstable states. It is the very negotiation and contestation between different competing envisioned resilient states of the community/society, which may lead towards a sustainable co-dependent evolution of the human–environment system. ▶ If resilience theory is proposed as the preferred approach by which DRR is framed and implemented, it needs to acknowledge much more explicitly the role of stakeholder agency and the processes through which legitimate visions of resilience are generated.