How is resilience conceptualized in different fields, and which are the key texts on resilience in these fields? I'm thinking of crisis management, development, ecology, economy, engineering, psychology, et cetera. Sometimes it means bouncing back to a previous state, at other times it means learning and adapting, and sometimes it is intimately related to broader frameworks, such as adaptive cycle theory.
Hello Patrik
These papers may assist you. Resilience often has multiple definitions, depending on the field you are working in, and the questions you are asking. You may want to focus your definition and literature review into a more specific field.
Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010). Resilience thinking: Integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(4), 20.
Gunderson, L. H. (2000). Ecological resilience--in theory and application. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 425-439.
Hooper, D., Chapin Iii, F., Ewel, J., Hector, A., Inchausti, P., Lavorel, S., . . . Naeem, S. (2005). Effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning: A consensus of current knowledge. Ecological monographs, 75(1), 3-35.
Mellin, C., Huchery, C., Caley, M. J., Meekan, M. G., & Bradshaw, C. J. A. (2010). Reef size and isolation determine the temporal stability of coral reef fish populations. Ecology, 91(11), 3138-3145.
Walker, B. (1995). Conserving biological diversity through ecosystem resilience. Conservation Biology, 9(4), 747-752.
Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5.
Thanks. My plan is to provide a brief overview of various definitions and usages of resilience before outlining the one I'll be using myself.
Dear Patrik,
You raise an important question regarding the topical issue of “resilience” and rightly identifies the need of the providing the different interpretation of the “resilience”. From the ‘built environment’ discipline or field of research, one of the key and leading journal publishing articles in that area is the “International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment”. You would also find articles related to dealing with ‘crisis management’ or indeed ‘disaster management’.
Some example(s) of issues dealing with ‘resilience’ from the ‘cities’ or ‘sustainability’ point of view can be found in the following article:
Hoffman, L.M. (2014), From Sustainability to Resilience: Why Locality Matters, in William G. Holt (ed.) From Sustainable to Resilient Cities: Global Concerns and Urban Efforts (Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 14) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.341 - 357.
Some insights into the interpretation of the ‘resilience’ from the ‘disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation’ perspective can also be found in the following article:
Sudmeier, K.I. (2014) "Resilience – an emerging paradigm of danger or of hope?", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 23 Iss: 1, pp.67 – 80.
The above study is interesting as it further connects the meaning of ‘resilience’ from the ‘sustainable development’ angle as well. In addition, it clarifies the misconceptions about the various paradigms associated with the interpretation or definition of ‘resilience’, something that your question as raised seeks to have answers.
Some other studies have further provided mechanisms for measuring ‘resilience’, and in so doing, provided various insights of what ‘resilience’ is (in order to measure the concept). I would recommend looking up the following citation:
Sudmeier, K.I., Jaboyedoff, M. and Jacquet, S. (2013) "Operationalizing “resilience” for disaster risk reduction in mountainous Nepal", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 22 Iss: 4, pp.366 - 377.
Given the correct interpretation of the meaning of ‘resilience’ within your question, the above selected articles (the list is exhaustive), would nevertheless provide you with some insights on the different interpretations of does “resilience” in different fields in different research/practice/policy. Furthermore, you might wish to examine other concepts such as ‘resilient people’ and I believe the some research has also been undertaken linking the concept of ‘resilience’ with risk management. The ‘adapting’ you refer to within your question or part description of the concept aligns well with the key principles from ‘risk management’ such as coping strategies.
Kind regards,
Nicholas
Great question Patrik,
your overview of the usage of the term 'resilience' will be a nice contribution. Related to this discussion, I just read about resilience definitions in the book 'Managing forests as complex adaptive systems: building resilience to the challenge of global change'.
Briefly, Holling (1996) separated 'engineering resilience' and 'ecological resilience'. 'Engineering resilience' is defined the speed at which a systems returns to a previous state (Gunderson et al. 2010). The definition for 'ecological or ecosystem resilience' seems more broad but relates to the amount of disturbance an ecosystem can withstand without being pushed into a new stable state. Within this there can be 'general resilience' and 'specific resilience'.
Hope this helps.
All the best,
Anya Reid
Gunderson, L., Allen, C.D. and Holling, C.S. 2010. Foundations of Ecological Resilience. Island Press, Washington, DC.
Holling, C.S. 1992. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Messier, C., Puettmann, K.J. and Coates, K.D. 2013. Managing forests as complex adaptive systems: building resilience to the challenge of global change. Routledge, New York.
In the disaster resilience field, resilience has been variously conceptualized.
Of course the need to measure resilience is overstated and heavily underlined in all policy spheres with the emergence of too many resilience indices at household, urban and systems level.
There may be some good work from Manyena from Northumbria University and Bahadur (2010) under ODI publications called Resilience Rennaisance .
You might find the following links to our website useful:
http://www.resilientus.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/definitions-of-community-resilience.pdf
http://www.resilientus.org/resilience-what-is-it-anyway/
The key publication is
Norris, Fran. “Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology. 41: 127-150, 2008.
Patrik try to interpert in accordance with your interest/ subject of study because otherwise you might get lost with the amount of definitions and studies that disucussed the idea of resilience ...resilience is a fuzzy and subjective concept, so try to discuss it in general and then focus on your point of interest....good look with your study
The concept has an important use in social and psychological research. An example is this quote from Michael Ungar:
http://resilienceresearch.org/
“In the context of exposure to significant adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways.”
Despite the different specific definitions, there is a common theme of an ability to give a positive coping response to stress or adversity.
Hi Patrik,
Our experiences is that even within a particular conceptual and disciplinary frame, we find that there is diversity in definitions of this multidimensional concept. One of the ways in which we have tried to map out the commonalities and differences is to employ automated content analysis of specified literature, it certainly brings up a way to adopt and approach the topic as many above have already advised.
Conference Paper Organizational resilience and the challenge for human resour...
Resilience roughly stands for the capability of to withstand . Here is the glossary entry we use in the CRISMA project - in th econtext of disaster management: https://crisma-cat.ait.ac.at/glossary/resilience
The interesting thing is that resilience is becoming a no-no word in certain contexts.
I often use "resilience" in the context of crowdsourcing and crowdtasking for crisis management, in the sense "improved (soft) volunteer management leads to higher societal resilience". So from my point of view, resilience is something that is good to have and can be strengthened through use of modern information & communication technology.
On the other hand, Terry Cannon (lead editor and author of several chapters of this years http://www.ifrc.org/en/publications-and-reports/world-disasters-report/world-disasters-report/) appears to be quite fed-up with the use of word "resilience" by the government.
Basically he sees it as a buzzword which the governments use in order to avoid responsibility. See e.g. his "Vulnerability, resilience and development discourses in context of climate change" paper, DOI 10.1007/s11069-010-9499-4
The Stockholm Resilience Center just published a series of videos. One of them defines in a fairly non-scientific but intuitive and entertaining way. It might not help you, but it's always fun to see science in plain words.
http://vimeo.com/97154528
After the Holocaust: from the ashes new psychological inquiries are rising. They are linked to the work of: Bruno Bettelheim, Uri Bronfenbrenner, Michael Rutter, Charles R. Snyder, Malka Margalit, Michael Ungar & al. Characteristic concepts of such a context are: childrens’ needs, ecologies of socialisation, morphogenesis, resilience, psychology of hope, loneliness of children, coping, salutogenesis. Working with resilience gains from being placed in its historical context by taking a broader look at things. Opting for a narrower view, look at the seminal work of Michael Ungar. Linking resilience and empowerment might also be an option.
Hello,
Since you are in NZ, you could look at the ideas in a Min of Health publication from about 2007-8 on psychosocial recovery in emergency events, this was great for perspectives on human resilience responses to trauma (earthquakes and floods etc) . Sorry that I don't have the author's name.
Also, I noticed that the New Zealand Planning Institute in Dec last year, had a discussion regarding resilience in a changing environment - pitched at planners and other professionals working in resource management related fields. The discussion was just two lecturers I think, and it was online, accessible via NZPI website. (Or via any Planners you know who are members of the NNZPI).
At the secondary teaching level in Ontario, Canada resiliency is largely spoken of as “bounding back” from a trauma or significant stresses in their life. The word “bounce” in my opinion isn’t a useful word as it doesn’t capture struggle that groups or individuals experience to get “back
Resilience is essentially adaptive. I like to think of it as "dynamic robustness" in the context of complex adaptive systems. Humans are wont of saying,"Where there is a will, there is a way." A chaotician may say"Nature finds a way."
https://youtu.be/SkWeMvrNiOM
Much like:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8672490_RNA_finds_a_simpler_way
Article RNA finds a simpler way
In case of process systems, 'resilience' can be understood as ability of the system to tolerate deviations in operating conditions still meeting targeted performance levels.For example, a distillation column which is designed for (say) 100% feed capacity may be able to perform (say) at 110% of feed capacity without any adverse effects on its product specifications. This inherent resilience of a process equipment may be conveniently quantified using laws of thermodynamics.
In case of process systems, 'resilience' can be understood as ability of the system to tolerate deviations in operating conditions still meeting targeted performance levels.For example, a distillation column which is designed for (say) 100% feed capacity may be able to perform (say) at 110% of feed capacity without any adverse effects on its product specifications. This inherent resilience of a process equipment may be conveniently quantified using laws of thermodynamics.
In case of process systems, 'resilience' can be understood as ability of the system to tolerate deviations in operating conditions still meeting targeted performance levels.For example, a distillation column which is designed for (say) 100% feed capacity may be able to perform (say) at 110% of feed capacity without any adverse effects on its product specifications. This inherent resilience of a process equipment may be conveniently quantified using laws of thermodynamics.
Article Simulation Studies for Analysis of Inherent Resilience Prope...
in the organisational context resiliense means the ability of organisation to ready , react , respond , and recover from all disruptive events that could impact the business critical functions
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