Operationalizing resilience: application of the disaster resilience integrated framework for transformation to enhance community resilience in Fiji

Climate change has increased the frequency and severity of weather events worldwide, significantly affecting marginalized communities in Pacific Island Countries, especially in urban informal settlements. These communities face substantial challenges that necessitates a focus on resilience strategies. The prevalence of macro-resilience frameworks and top-down approaches, which often fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, has sparked calls for targeted resilience efforts. Limited empirical evidence on how urban informal settlements respond, adapt, or recover from slow-onset human-induced climate events such as coastal, pluvial, and fluvial flooding, further impedes the operationalization of resilience. The study utilizes the Disaster Resilience Integration Framework for Transformation (DRIFT) to explore how macro-resilience frameworks represent the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities across 10 flood-prone urban informal settlements. Focusing on 42 households within Fiji's Greater Suva Urban Area, it documents the resilience capacities that influence flood protection and identifies broader factors that enable or constrain transformative resilience. The findings emphasize the importance of recognizing all resilience capacities as interconnected components within a holistic system, where communities adapt and rely on a blend of responses to navigate systemic constraints. Communities often move both “upward” and “downward” along the resilience spectrum as they confront evolving challenges. Recognizing this interconnectedness is crucial for effectively operationalizing resilience in marginalized communities in the Global South. <b>Trial registration:</b>Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618000633280..