Paul-Răzvan ȘERBAN¹, Cristian TĂLÂNGĂ², Radu SĂGEATĂ³ & Dragoș BAROIU^3
1University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography, Bucharest & Vasile Goldis Western University of Arad, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Engineering and Computer Science, paulrazvanserban@yahoo.co.uk
²University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography, Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Research
on Territorial Dynamics (CICADIT), Bucharest, Romania, cristian.talanga@geo.unibuc.ro
³Institute of Geography, the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, radu_sageata@yahoo.com, baroiud@yahoo.com

INCREASING THE RURAL COMMUNITIES’ RESILIENCE THROUGH UNCERTAIN TERRITORIAL SYSTEMS

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How the decision makers act on the territorial system seems at first glance coherent and self-evident, the communal component desiring a high standard of living while entrepreneurial component trying to maximize their profits. In addition, the political component should be considered by governmental and local policies but also by the non-governmental component (governance) that provides the link between local (the problems faced) and national level (hence local problems are managed through budgetary allocation). Thus, the territorial system is complex, involving the underlying relationships between components whose evolution is difficult to determine. To reveal the links between the community and the entrepreneurial component, so the resilience of human communities, we used the Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Ascendant Classification. Within Hierarchical Ascending Classification we started from the spatial component, from the similarities in regions profile seen apriori as a group of components while within the Principal Component Analysis we considered the distribution of each component, comparing it with the others, and based on similarities of distribution, we grouped them around some principal components. Local profiling of the community component (movement of people looking for a job) and of the entrepreneurial component (employers’ decisions to increase or reduce the number of jobs) was the first step in the study of resilience of human communities. The next step was to analyze the causes of the deficit of resilience (no correlation between the evolution of the community and the entrepreneurial component) and the role of self-organization to increase resilience to a level that would ensure sustainable development. To this end our case studies were two local resilience deficient communities, each with its distinct profile. In the first case, low resilience was due to the inflexibility of commuting workers laid off from jobs in the neighbouring town; in the second case, low resilience was due to the difficulty of high school and vocational school graduates to accede to the labor market in their native community. In none of these cases, the local authorities could not do anything to solve the problem, because the magnitude of the phenomenon was beyond them. In times of economic growth, the presence of commutation and of schools represented strengths for the communities, while in times of economic and financial crisis they became vulnerabilities.