Building community resilience: can everyone enjoy a good life?

The New Earswick Good Life Initiative (GLI) was an 18-month participatory action research project in York, UK, designed to build community resilience and foster sustainable lifestyles. The project found that successful pro-environmental behavior change requires more than locally relevant ideas; it necessitates time, the transformation of social relationships, and the strengthening of local institutions and power balances. The paper argues that building social capital, leadership skills, and support networks is essential for communities to effectively engage with policy and take local responsibility for their environment.

• The New Earswick Good Life Initiative demonstrated that introducing new ideas for sustainability requires they be locally relevant and given sufficient time and care to become embedded within the community.
• Changing how a community manages its environment requires systemic social changes, including the transformation of social relationships, the strengthening of institutions, and the influencing of local power dynamics.
• Successful local responsibility for environmental issues depends on the development of resilient attributes, specifically social capital, knowledge, leadership skills, and social networks, which enable communities to engage with national and local policies.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2015). Building community resilience: can everyone enjoy a good life? https://www.sei.org/publications/building-community-resilience-can-everyone-enjoy-a-good-life/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Building community resilience: can everyone enjoy a good life? 2015. https://www.sei.org/publications/building-community-resilience-can-everyone-enjoy-a-good-life/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Building community resilience: can everyone enjoy a good life? |date=6 November 2015 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/building-community-resilience-can-everyone-enjoy-a-good-life/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2015building, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Building community resilience: can everyone enjoy a good life?}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2015}, month = nov, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/building-community-resilience-can-everyone-enjoy-a-good-life/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }