Resilience Within Limits: Institutional Recreancy, Community Recomposition, and Community-Engaged Climate Research in Coastal Philippines

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: From Environmental Risk to Social Response

Abstract

This paper examines solutions-focused sociological research in the context of climate vulnerability. It shows how community-centered inquiry can refine conflict-based analyses of institutional recreancy and generate insights relevant to policy and praxis. Drawing on mixed-method research in coastal communities in the Philippines, this study analyzes how residents mobilize to build resilience amid escalating climate threats and institutional inaction. It examines how everyday practices of adaptation, collective action, and negotiation with state institutions challenge dominant models of governance.
The study explores how coastal communities in vulnerable, low-lying regions of the Global South recognize climate change risks and negotiate adaptation and disaster resilience. It focuses on two communities in the Philippines: BASECO (Barangay 649) in Manila and Siruma municipality in Camarines Sur. This study employs participant observation, document review, semi-structured interviews, a survey, and a photovoice project.
Preliminary findings indicate that community responses to climate risk are shaped by constrained agency within patronage-based governance systems. Residents frame adaptation activities within perceived limits established by local government, revealing how institutional norms structure social imagination and constrain collective agency.
Lived practices of recomposition, through which residents reconfigure social and ecological assets to manage risk, integrate ecological and social infrastructure such as beaches, mangroves, and mutual aid networks. However, these practices largely remain within coping capacity. Adaptive and transformative capacities are constrained by governance systems that limit access to resources, decision-making authority, and mechanisms to implement planning goals. In this context, climate resilience is not absent but institutionally limited.
This paper asks how coastal communities interpret and respond to institutional recreancy under escalating climate risk, how those practices illuminate the structural limits of resilience capacity within patronage-based governance systems, and in what ways research designs can support communities in developing pathways for climate adaptation and institutional accountability.

Author

• Nicole Y Zdrojewski, Virginia Tech