Producing resilience: governance, social relations, and climate risk in coastal communities

Resilience has become a central concept in climate adaptation research, particularly in coastal regions where environmental change is experienced as an ongoing condition rather than an episodic shock. This article advances a different perspective by examining coastal resilience in West Java, Indonesia. The study explores how resilience takes shape through the interaction of social relations, governance arrangements, economic recovery capacity, mitigation practices, and critical infrastructure. Methodologically, the study engages the Coastal Community Resilience Index (CCRI). Survey data from four coastal regencies are analyzed using descriptive statistics, Weighted Mean Index scoring, Multidimensional Scaling, and Structural Equation Modeling. The findings show that resilience in the study sites is sustained primarily through social relations and routine cooperation, which stabilize livelihoods and everyday life amid recurrent disturbances. At the same time, economic buffers remain thin, governance is uneven in reach, and material infrastructure constrains the scope of adaptation. By foregrounding how resilience is produced rather than possessed, this article contributes to environmental sociological debates on climate adaptation, governance, and inequality. This study advances a relational and process-based interpretation of resilience that challenges conventional index-based assessments, showing that similar resilience scores may obscure divergent configurations of social effort, institutional mediation, and material constraint.