Community Resilience to Environmental Health Crises: A Grounded Theory Study of Responses to Flooding in Benue State, North Central Nigeria

The recurrent catastrophic flooding events in Benue State have generated complex environmental health crises involving water contamination, disease outbreaks, displacement, and mental health impacts, yet the mechanisms through which communities build or lose resilience to these crises remain theoretically underdeveloped in the Nigerian context. This dissertation employs a grounded theory methodology to develop an original theory of community resilience to environmental health crises, grounded in the experiences of flood-affected communities in Makurdi, Agatu, and Apa local government areas, Benue State. Data were generated through thirty-eight in-depth interviews with community members who had experienced repeated flooding, twelve focus group discussions disaggregated by gender and age, observations during two flood events, and documentary analysis of emergency response records and health facility data from 2020 to 2024. Constant comparative analysis and theoretical sampling were conducted iteratively until theoretical saturation was achieved. The resulting grounded theory proposes the concept of Environmental Health Adaptive Capacity as the core category, comprising six interacting dimensions: collective ecological knowledge, social network density, institutional trust, resource mobilization capacity, health literacy, and cultural risk narrative. The theory identifies three phases of resilience enactment, namely anticipatory, absorptive, and transformative, and specifies the conditions under which communities transition between resilience states. The dissertation makes an original theoretical contribution to environmental health resilience science and provides a practitioner-relevant framework for strengthening community response to environmental health crises in flood-prone areas. Keywords: community resilience, flooding, grounded theory, Benue State, environmental health crises.