Insights / SOCIAL CAPITAL + SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Mapping invisible ties with visible benefits
By renae hanvin
Aug 31 2025
Communities are a lot like mushrooms. On the surface, both people and fungi thrive in favourable conditions. Beneath the surface, they are drawn together and supported by networks of invisible ties.
In the case of mushrooms, it’s the mycelial network, while for humans it’s social capital and social infrastructure, the shared connections between people and places.
These hidden networks are critical for the health and resilience of the ecosystems they support, dispensing resources and increasing the chances of survival.
But how do you measure the invisible? And why does it matter?
That’s what we set out to explore through our Social Capital and Social Infrastructure Measurement Framework.
Created with a singular goal in mind, the Framework will help communities and governments measure what truly matters. That is, the connections and places that foster them, in order to reduce disaster risk and build long-term resilience.
The Framework is also designed to directly support and align with broader national and international policies and commitments, addressing key gaps identified through various inquiries and strategic reviews.
A vision that spans Australia-wide
Nationally, the Australian Disaster Risk Reduction Framework (DRRF) outlines the vision for a disaster-resilient future, structured around shared responsibility and risk-informed decision-making.
The DRRF specifically identifies social capital as a key factor in influencing the ability of a person or community to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.
As a practical measurement tool, the Framework contributes to Priority 4 of the DRRF – “improve investment in risk reduction and resilience” – by offering governments and communities a way to assess and strengthen the overlooked dimensions of resilience.
And the Framework also aligns with the objective of the Second National Action Plan (NAP), Australia’s national priorities for reducing disaster risk, by complementing its intent to move beyond traditional risk models and incorporate the social dimensions of resilience.
Addressing 20 of the 24 National Actions, the Framework has been developed to offer both data and tools to help implement the Action Plan at a local, regional and national level.
Providing measurable insights into social ties and enabling infrastructure that underpins community resilience, the Framework fills a critical gap in how we currently assess and reduce disaster risk.
Best practice in action
The Systemic Disaster Risk Handbook (2023), published by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR), encourages a shift from siloed disaster planning to recognising how risks emerge across interconnected systems – including social systems.
The Handbook highlights the difficulty in measuring social factors such as relationships (or connections), trust and local networks, which significantly influence how communities experience and recover from disasters.
The Framework complements the Handbook by making the invisible visible, providing data on people connections and the places that foster people to connect. This enables governments and communities to better understand how connection, trust and place-based social infrastructure all reduce systemic risk.
Shaping tomorrow’s policies
In response to major events such as the 2022 floods and bushfires, the Australian Government commissioned a comprehensive review into disaster funding and coordination led by former Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Andrew Colvin AO APM.
The Colvin Review into disaster funding and coordination recommends a more strategic, data-informed approach to building national resilience. An approach our Framework directly supports, specifically several key recommendations, including:
- Strategic integration: It enables departments to incorporate social capital into resilience planning (recommendation #3)
- Advisory representation: It strengthens the case for including community and social capital expertise in disaster governance bodies (recommendation #8)
- Data for decision-making: It leads to providing timely, localised data on connection and places that foster connections to inform risk and investment decisions (recommendation #9)
- National outcomes: It can support future disaster funding frameworks by helping track social cohesion and resilience outcomes (recommendation #12)
- Partnerships: It highlights the value of place-based partnerships with not-for-profits, community groups and local businesses (recommendations #45 and #46)
Offering practical tools to bring the Colvin Review’s recommendations to life, the Framework embeds community connection into the core of disaster risk planning and investment.
The Independent Review of National Natural Disaster Governance Arrangements – also known as the ‘Glasser Review’, as it was led by Dr Robert Glasser – examined how Australia governs resilience across jurisdictions, and recommended a more coordinated, outcomes-focused approach.
The Glasser Review also called for a national resilience report to track progress against shared goals, and agreed indicators of resilience to guide funding and reform.
Resilient Ready’s Social Capital and Social Infrastructure Measurement Framework answers that call. It provides a ready-made, evidence-informed method to assess a foundational component of resilience – social capital – alongside the physical and institutional systems often prioritised.
Our Framework builds on global disaster resilience and social capital expert Professor Daniel Aldrich’s approach to measuring bonding, bridging and linking ties, which has been piloted in multiple countries, including Japan and the United States. This approach shows how social capital indicators can guide investment, planning and recovery.
Supporting jurisdictions in monitoring progress over time using a unified set of indicators, our Framework enables meaningful contributions to national reports such as the proposed Australian National Resilience Report.
Resilient Ready is excited to deliver this innovative piece of work and we look forward to sharing it with our stakeholders soon.
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