Community Resilience: Do Differences in COVID-Induced Regional Economic Impacts Draw Different Community Initiatives in Response? A Thematic Analysis

Someek Basu (), Josephine Pryce () and Riccardo Welters ()
Additional contact information
Someek Basu: College of Business, Law and Governance, DTES, James Cook University
Josephine Pryce: College of Business, Law and Governance, DTES, James Cook University
Riccardo Welters: College of Business, Law and Governance, DTES, James Cook University

A chapter in Community Empowerment, Sustainable Cities, and Transformative Economies, 2022, pp 337-354 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract COVID-19 affected every part of Australia - disrupting businesses and livelihoods, creating uncertainty for communities. This paper examined how COVID-19 impacted Cairns and Townsville with the specific aim to explore the proposition that, for similar levels of base-line resilience within a community, the number and type of community-based initiatives generated for the two tropical cities were directly related to the impact of this disruptive pandemic. This research employed a thematic analysis to examine community-based initiatives mentioned in articles published in: The Cairns Post and The Townsville Bulletin, for the year 2020. It also implemented a deductive approach in aligning these initiatives to community resilience capacities (viz. absorption, adaptive, and restorative capacities), leading to an interpretive and comparative understanding of the responses of the Cairns and Townville communities to COVID-19. Results indicated Cairns and Townsville were impacted differently by COVID-19 and responses varied accordingly. Firstly, more initiatives were generated in Cairns, likely due to its strong reliance on tourism and related sectors, which were severely affected by COVID-19, upsetting Cairns’ economy more than Townsville. Secondly, different types of initiatives were observed in the two cities, which focused on different capacities of community resilience. Initiatives in Cairns reinforced the community’s restorative capacity while Townsville, had no restorative initiatives and focused on strengthening absorption and adaptive capacities due to less severe impact of COVID-19. This supports the initial proposition that the number and type of community-based initiatives varies with the severity of the disruption and can therefore be used as an indicator of the severity of the disruption. Cairns and Townsville both developed various social and community initiatives to cushion the effects of COVID-19 which demonstrate their ingenuity and resilience. The initiatives provide a silver lining to the pandemic and should help in long-term sustainable recovery of Cairns and Townsville as regional cities servicing Tropical North Queensland.

Keywords: COVID-19; Community initiatives; Tourism; Thematic analysis; Community resilience; Tropical North Queensland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-16-5260-8_19

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811652608

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-16-5260-8_19

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().