Relying on social capital in all its forms: Disaster resilience in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian

Social capital research has clearly demonstrated the importance of many forms of social capital for the nature and direction of disaster recovery. However, much of this work has treated single forms of social capital or neglected how different forms of social capital are difficult to conceptually distinguish and generally observationally inseparable. This paper addresses this shortcoming by discussing the role of multiple forms of social capital in the response to Hurricane Dorian, a category 5 Hurricane that struck the Bahamas in late summer 2019. Evidence from 40 interviews conducted in two locales in the Bahamas that were particularly heavily struck by Dorian reveal that Bahamians relied on social capital in all its forms to prepare for the storm, ride it out, and recover afterward. There was no discrete kind of social capital that alone facilitated disaster preparation, survival, and recovery. Rather, a variety of mutually-reinforcing, inseparable social phenomena contributed to disaster resilience, all of which are forms of social capital. This points to the importance of studying social capital as a wholistic phenomenon and a concept with fuzzy borders as well as the importance of public policy that accounts for its complexity.

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