Even though there has been a huge increase in the literature about community resilience, the concept of community is rarely defined and problematized. This is evident also within flood risk management, where the role of communities may be acknowledged, but is seldom discussed in any detail. We analyzed semi-structured interview, policy document and household survey data from two flood-prone communities (Kittilä and Rovaniemi) in Finnish Lapland and evaluated how the community is being understood as well as what roles communities can play in flood risk management.
On the one hand, interviewees and survey respondents regarded the local community as being mainly informal and consisting of inhabitants of a specific area. On the other hand, in flood risk management policy documents, informal actors were given little role. However, we identified multiple roles of community in which formal institutional, organizational and informal actors at different scales become intermingled. These roles show that community is elusive and situated, making it difficult to draw ‘firm and fixed’ geographical and organizational boundaries around the local community. Firstly, communities can be seen as working together for a common goal. Flood preparedness and management in Finland is normally the responsibility of formal institutional actors such as regional environmental administration and rescue services, but during a major flood in Kittilä in 2005, formal institutions, civil society organizations and informal actors acted together. Secondly, there may be conflicting interests over what kind of flood protection measures should be built, and in this case, communities become arenas for conflicts between different informal and formal actors. Thirdly, communities are forums for both collection and dissemination of information. While communication tends to be directed from formal institutions to local residents, informal actors also provide local knowledge to the institutions. Fourthly, communities can play a role as a lobby supporting particular political and technical solutions to flood risk management. For example, in Rovaniemi, local residents, home-owners association, the City and Regional Council of Lapland have lobbied for the construction of a reservoir in an upstream protected area as the best way to solve the city's flood problem.