The role of outdoor recreation in building community resilience and adaptive capacity

Abstract

For the first time, outdoor recreation theory is applied within the framework of resilience theory to define the conceptual relationship between recreation benefit outcomes and community resilience. A theoretical and practical disconnect between the two disciplines is evident from the lack of literature identifying conceptual and operational linkages. Emerging from the application is a Recreation System Community Resilience Framework that models agent behavior, embedded green space, networks of service providers and feedback mechanisms to demonstrate recreation connections to resilience concepts. The Recreation Benefits-Based Model is identified as the best fit to deliver sustainable high leverage and capacity-building resilience for communities. Anchorage, Alaska neighborhoods are chosen to test the operational relationship between the constructs of outdoor recreation opportunity diversity and community resilience and adaptive capacity. The findings indicate support for the hypothesis that community resilience increases as recreation diversity increases. The results demand widespread implementation of the Benefits-Based Model in order for recreation to fully participate in the community well-being, resilience, and adaptive capacity discussion. The message to resilience practitioners is to reject activity-based visitor numbers, trail miles and park acres to indicate community health and insist on meaningful recreation system outcome indicators.