Beyond Money: A Social Burden Framework to Enhance Resilience Valuation for Tribal Communities in the United States: Article No. 103934

This article reflects on the present challenges of making proactive investments in critical infrastructure resilience and proposes recommendations for better integrating non-financial benefits into investment and project financing decision-making. Quantitative methodologies are required to enable communities, utilities, and financing organizations to evaluate return on investment through a more complete, socio-economic lens that more fully captures the true returns of alternative resilience proposals. Although this need is universal, it is further exacerbated in historically disadvantaged, under-resourced, and disenfranchised communities which were excluded from large-scale federal-level infrastructure investments in the past, and in which today, the onus of securing financing for infrastructure resilience projects falls on community members. This need is illustrated, and a solution for it demonstrated, through a case study of a successful implementation of such a techno-socio-economic resilience investment valuation framework in a tribal context.