Social Resilience to Climate-Related Disasters in Ancient Societies: A Test of Two Hypotheses

Abstract.  Current literature on disaster response argues that societies providing greater local participation in decision-making and which have more community coordination and governance organizations are m ore resilient to climate-related disasters.  In contrast, recent research in psychology has argued that societies with tighter social norms and greater enforcement of those norms are more resilient.  This paper tests whether one or both of these seemingly competing perspectives can be empirically supported through an examination of the diachronic impact of climate-related disasters on ancient societies.  A cross-cultural research design and a sample of 33 archaeologically-known societies bracketing 22 catastrophic climate-related disasters are used to test two hypotheses about resilience to climate-related disasters.  The paper finds that societies allowing greater political participation appear to provide greater resilience to catastrophic climate-related disasters, generally supporting the predominant perspective in contemporary disaster response.