Encouraging a more just and inclusive approach to stimulating community resourcefulness is seen as crucial for achieving greater equality and inclusivity, but also greater security and resilience at a local level. By nurturing broader participation in resourceful environmental practices, in a way which simultaneously capitalises on existing strengths and tackles known points of vulnerability - be they social, environmental, economic, or a combination thereof - communities become equipped to navigate their own resourceful and resilient pathways to sustainability.
The ESRs will explore the role of public policy initiatives, as well as the impacts of private and third sector initiatives on socially innovative forms of local environmental resource management. In parallel, the ESRs will consider the roles and responsibilities of external stakeholders operating across a range of scales in either facilitating or constraining grassroots-led approaches to community resource management.
They will critically attend to the (sometimes contested) ways in which bottom-up approaches to establishing resilience and resourcefulness are either mobilised or blocked across a range of different national contexts. This extends to reviewing (for example) how political, market- based and institutional structures enable or restrict the ability of communities to self-organise in order to protect the needs of current residents and safeguard those of their future generations. At the same time, the transdisciplinary approach which features throughout RECOMS will further support the emergence of co-productive strategies to stimulating resourceful and resilient community environmental practice.