Gabriella Punziano, Alessandro Coppola, Matteo Del Fabbro, Paola Proieti, Chiara Vitrano, Alessandro Coppola, Cora Fontana, Valentina Gingardi, Punziano, Gabriella, Coppola, Alessandro, Del Fabbro, Matteo, Proieti, Paola, and Vitrano, Chiara
Post-disaster periods are exceptional times in which all sorts of social and grassroots responses to the shock arise. If, as argued by Forino (2015), resilience to disasters is to be understood as the ability of a community or society to resist, adapt and recover from the effects of disasters in an efficient and timely manner, then the role of individual and collective human capital in the creation of events and actions increasing the ability of a community to recover from a shock is absolutely central (Manyena, 2006; Cutter et al., 2008). More, in particular, disaster recovery requires inclusive practices which could reinforce the conventional top-down approaches with demand-side bottom-up actions showing spatial ethics while building social capital (Forino, 2015). In this perspective, natural disasters can be seen as ‘windows of opportunity’ for an authentic community resilience process that enhances alternative social practices while recognizing the role of spontaneity in response to an external shock and often in opposition to myopic institutional emergency management and reconstruction strategies (Tierney, 2009; Birkmann et al., 2008). Citizens can be pushed into a new exercise of power in the public arena, for which they ‘need to get together’ to form organizations and pursue common aims mobilizing technical and financial capital, but also human, cognitive, motivational and social capital (Mayunga, 2007; Chamlee- Wright & Storr, 2011; Aldrich & Meyer, 2015). Precisely the growth of these forms of capital has justified and sustained a surge in the number and relevance of civil society organizations in post-earthquake L’Aquila. Based on this essential observation and with the aim of assessing how the organized civil society responded to the unprecedented, the challenging situation represented by the disaster, this chapter aims to answer two over-arching questions. How have different forms of capital – human, cognitive, motivational and social – contributed to the expansion of the organized civil society? How can this expansion be not merely occasional but, instead, sustainable in the long-term? In particular, we inquired into the circular relationship between the earthquake, the organized civil society and the temporal dimension by investigating the current situation, compared with two different points in time: the pre-earthquake phase (before April 2009) and the one immediately following it (from April 2009 until mid-2012). This chapter presents a study organized in several steps. In the first step, we offer a review of the existing literature on civil society, community resilience and social capital in the context of crisis and disasters. In the second step, we introduce an exploration of existing data sets and interviews with key local stakeholders in order to provide an assessment of the quantity, quality and spatial distribution of the organized civil society before and after the earthquake1. In the third step, we elaborate on an online semistructured and open-ended questionnaire sent to a list of about 300 organizations, chosen among NGOs of different sizes, located in different spatial contexts and carrying out a variety of activities. The return rate was about 10%. The results were used to put NGOs from a historical perspective assessing the newly emerging needs after the earthquake up to today. By doing so, we single out different trajectories in the organized civil society that might influence future scenarios for development.