Community Resilience research

Dr Dan Sage, Dr Chris Zebrowski and Nina Jorden (Loughborough University) are leading on UK Cabinet Office supported research on Enhancing the use of Resilience Direct in the Covid-19 response: a comparative analysis of Local Resilience Forums.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), who are part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the research is exploring how the Resilience Direct (RD) digital collaboration platform is used by multi-agency Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to remotely plan and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research aims to produce the first independent evidence base for LRF practitioners, national policymakers, and scholars, to understand how RD is being used to facilitate LRF collaboration and to then rapidly circulate best practices through RD to enhance the UK’s planning and response to COVID-19.

The national scope of the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to compare how RD is being used to enable collaboration across different LRFs. Digital ethnography and interviews will be used to understand how and why RD is used by different LRFs.

Digital ethnography will be used to understand how and why RD is used differently by LRFs. This analysis will: a) diagnose sub-optimal uses of RD within LRFs; and b) help identify best practice solutions for joint working on RD within, and between, LRFs. These findings will be identified and communicated to all UK multi-agency emergency forms on a monthly basis on the RD platform.

This research will provide timely, cyclical, feedback on the effective use of RD to support multi-agency collaboration. This project is designed to deliver immediate impact to improve the UK’s response to COVID-19 as well as critical insights into the role of technology in facilitating emergency collaborations that will benefit future responses.

The researchers are looking for Community Resilience forums to get involved, for example in sharing access to Resilience Forum pages or by taking part in interviews.

To contact the researcher team please send an email by clicking here:-

N.Jorden@lboro.ac.uk