Abstract
Objectives:
We provide a conceptual review of mutual aid to operationalize a more just notion of resilience at individual, community, and group levels. We link scholarship across disciplines to examine how mutual aid contributes to adaptive capacity to support climate resilience. Mutual aid has the potential to support responses to climate change that do not return to the status quo, but instead address systemic burdens and vulnerabilities to support existing community strengths and assets.
Data Sources:
Prior scholarship on mutual aid from multiple disciplines: engineering, social work, law, sociology, political science, and international development.
Review Methods:
We develop a conceptual review of literature from multiple disciplines to propose mutual aid typologies that provide more nuance and understanding of the variation of mutual aid.
Results:
We identify three types of mutual aid (institutional networks, group-based self-help, and social movement networks) and demonstrate their variation across reciprocity, solidarity, self-determination, and resistance.
Conclusions:
The variation in mutual aid suggests that scholarly disciplines and practitioners use the term to suggest different organizational forms and different outcomes associated with mutual aid. Mutual aid offered by group-based models and social movement networks provides routes to community resilience that support community-led responses to climate change focused on collective advocacy and care. This review centers on building adaptive capacity to address injustice and inequities in short- and long-term responses to climate change.
Introduction
From hurricanes to heat waves, social ties mediate response, survival, and recovery in the face of climate change impacts. The social infrastructure that connects people, such as friends, neighbors, local shops, or community groups, supports disaster response and survival. 1 The help people receive from their social network underpins survival in response to physical damage and infrastructure failure, but also provides emotional and psychological support in response to the less visible traumatic impacts of climate change. Collective acts of help and support broadly constitute mutual aid and remind scholars and practitioners that “resilience is a function of the strength of a community.” 2 Mutual aid as a contributor to resilience recognizes social relationships as assets that build support for changes in economic and political systems and physical infrastructure that are required for more equitable and just responses to climate change. Mutual aid is not a new concept but is gaining traction as people cope with the impacts of climate change and begin the difficult task of adapting to climate change.
Increasingly, academic scholars and activists alike recognize the interrelation between climate justice, racial justice, and decolonizing climate action. 3 Shalanda Baker's notion of anti-resilience ties energy and climate policy to the antiracism and antioppression goals of social justice. 4 Anti-resilience as a means to redefine resilience at a more systemic level requires subsequent investigation of community-level conditions that support acts of resistance and political engagement to achieve more just responses to climate change.
The role of mutual aid in resilience includes resistance and political engagement, grounding response in community actions, and interpersonal support to develop a foundation of advocacy and care. We explore multiple uses of the term mutual aid to illustrate how it is used in different ways and by different disciplines to achieve different outcomes. The variation in mutual aid suggests a common goal of reciprocity across types, but specific attention to solidarity, self-determination, and resistance is central only to some forms of mutual aid applicable to the climate context.
Our conceptual review of the types of mutual aid operationalized in climate response and preparedness builds links across disciplines to understand climate resilience as responses that do not return to the status quo, but rather responses that address systemic burdens and support existing community strengths and assets. By examining the attributes of mutual aid, we look at resilience beyond a single climate event and instead as a component of social capital that supports individual, community, and societal responses to climate change. Prior scholars examined mutual aid primarily within disciplinary bounds and without theorizing about how different forms of mutual aid underpin different notions of climate resilience.
Methods
Compared with related terms, such as resilience or social capital, mutual aid has received relatively little attention in academic scholarship, especially the forms of mutual aid active in climate change response and adaptation. In this conceptual review, we examine literature from multiple disciplines to propose dimensions of mutual aid that clarify typologies as they relate to a more community-centered understanding of climate resilience. We pursue a typology approach in this review article to provide “a more precise and nuanced understanding of” mutual aid and to illustrate the variation in key dimensions of mutual aid as it relates to climate change. 5 In Appendix Table A1, we demonstrate the disciplinary variation in the scholarship on mutual aid from engineering to social work.
We identify common attributes associated with mutual aid and then categorize literature on mutual aid into three types: institutional mutual aid networks, group-based self-help, and social movement networks. Prior scholarship was identified within each of these typologies to understand the form, goals, and relationship to resilience. We aim for conceptual and theoretical saturation regarding mutual aid, rather than a comprehensive review of every related article. We pursued this approach as we identified few academic articles on institutional or social movement mutual aid networks, although we are acutely aware of the relevance of these two types of mutual aid in on-the-ground response to climate impacts from public discourse. Tracing how mutual aid is used to support responses to climate change reinforces the ways resilience manifests in community and interpersonal interactions.
What is Mutual Aid?
Mutual aid can be an immediate response to a single disruption or event (e.g., extreme weather, wildfires, and disease) and can also support long-term ongoing or daily needs. Situating resilience in the social context of mutual aid reinforces that recovery endures beyond a single event, requiring care and healing to encourage stronger responses to future disruptions.
The goals of mutual aid focus on reciprocity, solidarity, self-determination, and resistance. Each goal links to a framing of resilience, but not all goals are activated in the same manner across forms of mutual aid. In Table 1, we present characteristics of three types of mutual aid (institutional networks, 6 group-based self-help, and social movement networks 7 ) and their associated goals and forms of resilience.
Types of Mutual Aid, Variation in Goals, and How Mutual Aid Supports Different Understandings of Resilience
The embeddedness of mutual aid in social ties and both formal and informal institutions suggests that mutual aid and social capital may be mutually reinforcing. Across different types of mutual aid, trust—be it directly conferred or networked and conveyed through intermediaries—plays an important role in the cooperation required by acts of mutual aid. As Putnam describes applied to rotating credit associations, “mutual aid practices…themselves also represent investments in social capital” that can extend beyond economic transactions to build solidarity. 8 Social capital is critical for the collective action required to adapt to climate change, frequently termed adaptive capacity. 9
Assessing different forms of mutual aid in response to climate change demonstrates that social capital underlies both immediate disaster response in the face of extreme weather events and the slower more gradual climate changes (e.g., recurring flooding and slower changes in precipitation or humidity) and the less visible associated impacts (e.g., trauma and psychological impacts). Of the forms of mutual aid described in this review, social capital is required even for institutional mutual aid that builds on the mutual confidence in shared agreements or transactions. 10 Embeddedness in social networks and personal and professional relationships helps to build trust. 11 Acts of mutual aid may, therefore, be embedded in the professional networks of electric utilities or within interpersonal norms of neighbors and friends; all have the potential to reinforce trust.
Examples of mutual aid today also reflect new arenas for understanding the construction of technology-enabled social capital, termed sociotechnical capital: the joint influence of information and communication technologies and social relationships to build trust and social capital. 12 For example, social media platforms help spread mutual aid responses to extreme weather events and can alert neighbors to localized weather conditions, often before formal news reporting. 13
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is when people return help or support they receive, such as financial support or engaging in trust-based activities. The norm of reciprocity contributes to social capital in either balanced (concurrent exchange) or generalized (continued exchange that may be imbalanced at a single point in time) forms. 14 Reciprocity can be further divided into direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity. For direct reciprocity, each actor reciprocates directly to those that offered support, whereas acts of indirect reciprocity may provide support to someone else, or the initial giver of support may receive future support from a different party. 15 As displayed in Table 1, we identify both direct and indirect reciprocity in mutual aid. Acts of reciprocity are associated with external motivations such as reputation building and internal motivations such as fairness and altruism. 16
Solidarity
Solidarity is used in multiple ways spanning social, civic, and political spheres. Scholz differentiates social solidarity as the bond created by a shared interest or membership within a community, civic solidarity as the obligation of civil society to protect against vulnerability, and political solidarity as activism in response to injustice, oppression, or vulnerability. 17 To support social movements, political solidarity is built by offering “spaces where people come together based on some shared need or concern but encounter and work closely with people whose lives and experiences differ from their own” as observed in some forms of mutual aid. 18
Self-determination
Self-determination is present in multiple forms of mutual aid and can operate on individual and collective levels. For mutual aid self-help groups, self-determination builds by problem-solving in the group context, reinforcing agency over one's actions to challenge the victim narrative or label. 19 In response to disasters, self-determination provides local and collective control over determining needs and building capacity to respond to those needs. 20 For Indigenous peoples, self-determination is the right to sovereignty and autonomy spanning political, social, cultural, and economic realms. 21
Resistance
Resistance can take many forms, from direct political acts such as rallies, strikes, and rebellions, to what Scott calls “everyday forms of resistance,” which comprise collective action but do not require formal coordination. 22 Mutual aid provides community-led actions that challenge systemic injustice “beyond momentary charity and enables communities to create structures to address their needs in the absence of the state and effective elected leaders.” 23 Resistance as a component of social movements mobilizes people to respond in direct and everyday forms and introduces alternatives to current economic and political institutions. 24 Resistance provides community-centered alternatives to crisis response given the failure of service providers and disaster response to address the needs of those most impacted by climate change.
Types of Mutual Aid in Response to Climate Change
Synthesizing from multiple disciplines, we describe three typologies of mutual aid applicable to the climate change context as indicated in Table 1: institutional mutual aid networks, group-based self-help, and social movement networks. Descriptions of mutual aid suggest that different types of mutual aid are active globally. Existing scholarship on international examples of mutual aid self-help groups suggests that local context influences the forms and reach of mutual aid, with the history of state–society relations having an ongoing and lasting impact on mutual aid. Each of the proposed types of mutual aid demonstrates how mutual aid as a form of cooperation contributes to adaptive capacity at multiple scales (from regional mutual aid utility agreements to interpersonal support and collective care).
Institutional mutual aid networks in response to disruptions
In the electricity sector, mutual aid (sometimes called mutual assistance) is predominantly structured by agreements to provide support or resources in response to system disruptions. The formality of mutual aid varies from informal agreements to legal contracts. This form of mutual aid provides emergency assistance most commonly as personnel, equipment, and materials to restore electricity service postdisruption. 25 Networked utility mutual aid primarily supports response and operations for utilities or service providers more broadly; it does not directly provide resources to communities impacted by an outage.
Regional models of utility mutual aid are frequently associated with disaster response. In the United States, some electric utilities belong to formal Regional Mutual Aid Assistance Groups that often follow top-down mutual aid protocols to facilitate planning, communication, dispatch, and response. 26 For example, using a multistate utility mutual aid response, a small municipal provider in Long Island was able to restore power following Superstorm Sandy after 1 week; without mutual aid, restoration may have taken twice as long. 27
Utility mutual aid suggests an approach that emphasizes strategic organizational decision making in the face of uncertainty. Scholarship on electricity sector disaster response mutual aid focuses most frequently on modeling mutual aid decisions and decision-support tools. 28 Engineering research identifies utility participation in mutual aid stemming from voluntary obligation, cost, preparedness, and corporate social responsibility. 29 Utility mutual aid can comprise thousands of workers; in response to Hurricane Isaac, Entergy in Louisiana relied on upward of 10,000 mutual aid workers from 25 states and hundreds of companies to restore power. 30 Networks of utility mutual aid agreements primarily operate within existing institutional arrangements to respond to service disruptions by restoring power and services to their prior state. This form of mutual aid is critical to address immediate needs, but it may restore (or not directly seek to alleviate) pre-existing inequities in electricity service.
Mutual aid agreements also exist to support a range of first responders, including firefighters and health care. The emphasis remains on sharing information, resources (supplies and equipment), or personnel, with some form of agreement among participating parties to govern the rules, processes, and procedures of mutual aid. 31 More formalized institutional mutual aid agreements can span international and domestic frameworks for deploying resources in response to disasters.
Self-help group mutual aid
In social and psychological services, mutual aid is often described as a self-help group that provides social support in community-based settings. Mutual aid in the form of self-help groups consists of meetings, chapters, groups, and organizations that provide support in difficult or celebratory life events, and reduce stigmas related to health, substance abuse, and disabilities. 32 In this setting, mutual aid is both an organizational form that is primarily focused on a grassroots group model and the support processes that stem from participating in said group. Furthermore, experiential knowledge is viewed as essential, providing support that stems from peers facing similar situations. 33 In this sense, one of the key characteristics of self-help group mutual aid is member ownership, in that these groups form to support grassroots activities, but their permanence is flexible and defined by the members. 34
Scholarship on self-help groups often focuses on how participation in a group builds resilience at an individual level, supporting mental health and well-being, which builds resilience based on emotional and spiritual support. 35 In this form of mutual aid, resilience often centers on longer-term social and economic conditions associated with overcoming adversity, responding to exposure to high-risk environments, and recovering from trauma. 36 Resilience is associated with personal self-efficacy and adaptability when faced with challenges, and the social supports that build cohesive communities and normalize challenging experiences. 37
Self-help groups are widely used, from support groups to savings groups, such as rotating savings and credit organizations. Savings groups build reciprocity in the form of risk sharing and income sharing, and groups may be temporary, based on all members receiving funds or a household item, or may last much longer. 38 Many countries, from the United States to Kenya to Scotland, have a history with rotating savings and credit organizations, and often the forms of savings groups reflect the social and cultural context in which they operate. 39 In Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, informal networks of community-based organizations, family, and friends finance access to services as informal networks of reciprocity that vary in durability, solidarity, and reach. These informal networks build on a long history of community support and collective resource use in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, but there is substantial variation at the local level based on historical experiences with the state. 40 International development scholarship highlights the link between reciprocity and access to financial resources, yet self-help groups in international development frequently focus on material issues (e.g., savings and credit activities) that overemphasizes material solutions compared with political or social actions. 41 Jakimow and Kilby remind us that organizations providing oversight over self-help mutual aid groups can influence the focus of on-the-ground group activities. Group-based mutual aid that emphasizes support for market-based failures may provide a framework for collective action after climate events and can offer much-needed material relief, but also may overlook how group-based mutual aid can support empowerment.
Across modes of self-help group mutual aid, the organizational form remains more informal and responds to changing needs and interactions with state agencies or other service providers (e.g., nongovernmental organizations or the private sector). The form of self-help groups may also vary based on the needs of the group members. Gerard Jacobs explores the role of Community-Based Psychological First Aid (CBPFA) in stressful events, including climate-related disaster conditions. CBPFA is a nonclinical practice in which community members are trained and community resources are harnessed to help individuals develop coping mechanisms in the face of stress (personal, family, or stressors in more extended social networks). 42 Approaches similar to CBPFA may support the formation of self-help group mutual aid practices in disaster conditions, but approaches may vary based on the intended audience (e.g., adults or children), whether the community members face differing adversities, or the geographic context (e.g., rural or urban). 43 The example of CBPFA demonstrates that although there are consistencies in the organizational form of self-help group mutual aid, the groups may be highly distinctive and context specific in practice.
Mutual aid in social movements of mutual aid
Mutual aid within social movements seeks to disrupt the status quo by promoting self-determination, pursuing solidarity, and building resistance. In this form, mutual aid is “political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.” 44 Scholarship on mutual aid in social movements is relatively nascent, but it builds on prior scholarship on social movements and a history of mutual aid activities that support social change and resistance.
Mutual aid in this form challenges mainstream approaches to charity and aid by offering a model of support that does not depend on an elite or a hierarchical structure to determine who deserves or is eligible for help. Spade describes networks of mutual aid that seek to challenge the status quo of capitalist economic organization and welfare based on socially constructed notions of eligibility, illustrating the potential for mutual aid to support those in need while resisting structures of power. However, the history of mutual aid is also a history of tension, with critiques that government welfare programs co-opt mutual aid models to the detriment of those in need of support. 45
When government services and aid fail in disaster response, grassroots efforts to activate and build community-based mutual aid can respond to on-the-ground needs. After Hurricane Maria, mutual aid in Puerto Rico supported survival and demanded government accountability, which reflects a cultural ethos of self-sufficiency in the context and ongoing impacts of colonization (“Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo,” which translates to “only the people save the people”). 46 Mutual aid offered a foundation for responses to COVID-19 and the January 2020 earthquake. 47 Isa Rodríguez Soto describes mutual aid post-disaster in Puerto Rico as providing resources, hope, and the social foundation for action. Mutual aid efforts in Puerto Rico “highlight the ongoing colonialism, injustice, and inequality fueling our desire to live and to not just survive, but also thrive. Mutual aid sustains us to continue to challenge these unjust systems.” 48 This type of mutual aid is often a response to failed government services and mistrust in the government.
Mutual Aid as a Link to Community Resilience and Adaptive Capacity
Community resilience requires understanding a community's ever-shifting risks, vulnerabilities, and assets. 49 Rather than traditional approaches to vulnerability assessments, which largely focus on defined categories of people (by race, age, disability, etc.), community resilience considers complex social structures (community, group, family, organization, etc.) and community assets. This approach to resilience emphasizes that reductions to vulnerability, as well as asset identification, strengthen a community's ability to respond to disasters. 50
Prior scholarship on the relationship between resilience and vulnerability in social-ecological systems proposes that studying the two concepts together will better provide real-world salience and application. 51 Applying the concept of resilience beyond ecological systems to include the co-constituted nature of social-ecological systems readily includes dimensions of social capital, leadership, learning/innovation, and a critical questioning of resilience as solely returning to a previous state when a more desirable, sustainable, and equitable state is possible. Vulnerability, although primarily focused on risk, threats, and associated outcomes, also introduces the multidimensionality of exposure, coping, and adaptive capacity. Risk can be operationalized as the interaction between a hazard and vulnerability and, critically, vulnerabilities are context dependent such that “the factors that make a system vulnerable to a hazard will depend on the nature of the system and the type of hazard in question.” 52
It is the context-specific nature of increasing climate hazards that reinforces the socially embedded nature by which mutual aid can enhance on-the-ground adaptive capacity. Intervening to enhance resilience or the “capacity of actors in a system to influence resilience” constitutes adaptability in social-ecological systems. 53 Elements of adaptive capacity are associated (both qualitatively and quantitatively) with voice, accountability, and government effectiveness. 54 Mutual aid may support voice and accountability while also intervening in situations where the government is not present, is ineffective, or failing to meet community needs in disaster response. Mutual aid is a component of adaptive capacity in the context of equitable resilience because the social capital present within mutual aid networks may influence the direction of resilience (either toward or away from the more just and desirable conditions scholars and activists increasingly call for).
Community resilience bridges the systems orientation of social-ecological systems and a more individual orientation rooted in psychology and mental health. Berkes and Ross demonstrate connections between the social-ecological lens and the psychological lens to support community resilience. The authors suggest that agency and self-organizing help construct a more integrated interdisciplinary understanding of community resilience. 55 The authors further suggest that adaptive capacity “can be activated when people exercise their agency” and that this is tied to a range of community strengths, such as people–place connections, leadership, and social networks. 56 Mutual aid represents potential pathways to support agency in climate adaptation as dimensions of mutual aid (reciprocity, solidarity, self-determination, and resistance) also intertwine with a strength-based approach to community resilience.
Strengths and limitations of group-based and social movement mutual aid in climate adaptation and recovery
Climate change resilience efforts can learn from each type of mutual aid to address the social and psychological as much as physical damages of climate crises and events. Recent scholarship linked stress after Hurricane Maria and mental health outcomes, 57 reinforcing that resilience relies on a range of social and psychological supports potentially provided by mutual aid. The link between climate change, trauma, and mental health is increasingly growing as climate change-related stress contributes to trauma and mental health burdens that are unequally experienced (across populations, geographies, and domains of activity—social, economic, and environmental). 58 An approach to resilience that incorporates multiple forms of mutual aid can address physical responses and needs as well as support systems for healing and emotional recovery post-disruption rooted in the strength of social infrastructure. Similar to how robust social networks support survival, mutual aid activities that pre-date a disaster serve to support survival during and after future disasters. 59
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, collective responses provided opportunities for mutually supported relationship building and healing. 60 Such responses included family support while recovering from injuries, holding vigils for those lost, protection against sexual assault, and even community soccer matches. Svistova and Pyles point to the role of the Vodou religion in building spiritual resilience and offering health, healing, and illness prevention strategies through collective community-focused rituals after the earthquake. 61 However, the authors also caution that outsiders must not misinterpret the strengths of the Vodou religion as a replacement for the very real material needs experienced by those suffering in the disaster's aftermath. They argue that although Vodou offered a spiritual practice that many Haitians were able to harness in a mutual aid context, it should not be considered a replacement for critical resources, and the overall need for mutual aid after the earthquake was a result of the government and international aid providers failing to provide such resources. Haitian art, film, and music movements centered on themes of solidarity, criticisms of the shortcomings of the foreign response, and national and community action also flourished after the earthquake. 62 These community-led activities operated within a social support structure that promoted healing and recovery distinct from what was provided by the international and humanitarian response to the disaster. Mutual aid—in particular the group and social movement forms—supports community-based models of recovery and healing while calling for more accountability and voice in how providers, agencies, and elected officials respond to community needs in the face of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters.
However, mutual aid networks can also harbor internal inequities or reflect external inequities. Research conducted on self-help mutual aid groups in the United Kingdom found that participation in community self-help mutual aid networks improved mental well-being and enhanced resilience to stressful health circumstances, but some self-help groups struggled with funding difficulties, securing transportation for disabled group members, and intrusive financial instructions from outside funders. 63 This suggests that how mutual aid interacts with other resources, organizations, and agencies may influence whether or how self-determination is enacted. Even when the social capital exists to establish self-help mutual aid groups, funding and access can exert external influence over mutual aid forms and processes.
Mutual aid networks can also suffer from some of the same structural inequities they intend to circumvent. Van Ryneveld et al. researched and participated in community action mutual aid networks in Cape Town, South Africa, during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore social movement mutual aid networks that provided food, factual safety information, and social support to prevent isolation. These social movement mutual aid networks often interfaced with governmental institutions, sometimes on an intimate level in which governmental representatives were members of their local community action network. 64 This connection produced some positive outcomes, such as co-learning sessions with community action network members and representatives from governmental agencies and institutions but the authors also observed that conflicts arose at the interface of the hierarchical governmental approach and the self-governed community action network. 65 This limitation reflects Spade's criticism of government co-optation of mutual aid processes and networks that can produce a system where those most in need remain underserved, either through the unintentional introduction of a hierarchy or incorporation of false notions of undeservingness. 66 Similar to COVID-19, climate change presents a threat of chronic long-term community stress conditions that will likely involve future interactions and engagement at the mutual aid–government interface.
Discussion
The three typologies of mutual aid identified in this review highlight a continuum of how resilience is or can be understood in the face of climate change. The term mutual aid in one context or discipline may suggest quite different forms of organization than expected in a different discipline. There is little discussion across the typologies of mutual aid, in part because each form of mutual aid has distinct goals that vary in their relationship to current political and economic systems. Yet the lens of mutual aid activities as purely the sharing of resources across organizational, social, or political boundaries can lose sight of the interpersonal and community-based avenues of responding to climate change by harnessing social capital. In developing this mutual aid typology, we illustrate that how mutual aid is defined has substantial implications for the associated forms of resilience. Prior scholarship that centers on the historical and continued impacts of energy and infrastructure systems on the poor and communities of color (e.g., Baker's anti-resilience) offers a system-level critique, networked social movement operationalizes this critique to develop opportunities for collective resistance.
Mutual aid in all forms described in this review is in dialogue with the history of government intervention, allocation of resources, and politics. The mutual aid networks after the 2020 earthquake in Puerto Rico provided immediate community support while demanding improved governmental response and accountability. 67 In this perspective mutual aid is filling a critical gap, but improved government services and accountability for providing such services is both expected and desired. 68 This differs from others (such as Spade or Van Ryneveld et al.) who argue that the government's involvement can lead to co-optation of the mutual aid process 69 or the introduction of a hierarchical structure that is contradictory to the core goals of mutual aid. 70 From state-led efforts to coordinate mutual aid networks of first responders to individuals and groups operating in spaces of state inaction or failure, or spaces where government intervention is less desired, the relationship between mutual aid and the state will continue to evolve, likely with both cooperation and contestation.
By and large, academic scholarship focuses on the positive contributions of all three types of mutual aid to on-the-ground support, from technical responses to building political activism. But mutual aid is not a panacea, and it faces challenges, including gender dynamics, identifying how resources are allocated in practice, and other biases. As forms of mutual aid continue to evolve, research and practitioners must also be aware of, and not overlook, the challenges and inequities of mutual aid in the context in which such activities occur. In our review, we found this to be a gap in the scholarship but recognize this as important for future scholarship.
Broader definitions of equitable resilience center on recognizing social vulnerability, power imbalances, and access to resources, 71 mutual aid addresses these issues as a component of resilience, by reinforcing the importance of lifting up the existing community assets in networks of advocacy and care. Community assets and a community resilience lens are less aligned with current dialogues regarding utility and first responder mutual aid, but rather than assume such approaches are incompatible this disconnect may suggest a gap in academic scholarship that explores how a social and community-asset lens may permeate all three types of mutual aid described in this review. Mutual aid reinforces that the interconnectedness of different formulations of resilience (social-ecological systems, community resilience, and anti-resilience) interact to reinforce adaptive capacity and promote an asset-oriented and strength-based approach to resilience.
Conclusion
Mutual aid focuses on organizational and community strength, understanding resilience beyond measures of vulnerability by focusing on community-led pathways to addressing climate change impacts and proposed responses or solutions. In this review, we identify three types of mutual aid (institutional networks, group-based self-help, and social movement networks), demonstrate their variation across reciprocity, solidarity, self-determination, and resistance, and illustrate that group-based models and social movements offer a route to community resilience by supporting community-led responses to systemic injustice that is heightened by the varied impacts of climate change.
Not all forms of mutual aid reflect the same notions of resilience, but all three described in this review rely on elements of social capital and in turn have the potential to contribute to building trust in how climate shocks and stressors are addressed. Notably, all three types of mutual aid can support the adaptive capacity needed to influence resilience at multiple levels, but each form prioritizes different goals of mutual aid (reciprocity, solidarity, self-determination, and resistance) and acts to address different dimensions of climate change impacts. For example, utility mutual aid often seeks to restore service with as little disruption as possible, whereas self-help groups provide a range of support to peers with shared experience (be it financial, psychological, or other impacts of climate change), and social network forms of mutual aid often seek to unearth and address the systemic inequities in how public services are allocated and who receives what help in response to climate-related shocks or stressors. There is substantial variation across these three types of mutual aid, but all illustrate that mutual aid provides both immediate and prolonged support in response to climate change impacts. Mutual aid supports the social infrastructure needed to meet the spiritual, psychological, mental health, and material needs that underpin the adaptive capacity required to respond to future disasters or slower, but long-term, environmental changes.
Footnotes
Authors' Contributions
A.C.: conceptualization (equal), writing – original draft; writing – review and editing. E.H.: conceptualization (equal), writing – original draft (lead); writing – review and editing.
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
Funding Information
No funding was received for this article.
Appendix
Examples of Mutual Aid Scholarship to Illustrate Interdisciplinary Breadth
| Scholar(s) | Discipline | Mutual aid attributes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reciprocity | Solidarity | Self-determination | Resistance | ||
| Klinenberg (2003) | Sociology | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Coles and Buckle (2004)a,b | Disaster recovery | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Greene et al. (2003) c | Social work | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Asgary et al. (2017) a | Engineering | ✓ | |||
| Archibald (2007) c | Social work | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Gugerty (2007) c | International development | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Seebohm (2013) c | Social care/health | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Spade (2020) b | Law | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Institutional mutual aid.
Social movement mutual aid networks.
Group-based self-help mutual aid.