Resilience

The word “resilience” originates from the Latin term “resiliens,” the present participle of

resilire- “re-” meaning back and “salire” meaning to jump or leap. The concept of resilience

has roots in various disciplines such as law, mechanics, psychology, disaster risk reduction,

etc.

The term has been passed

from mechanics to

ecology and psychology,

from there it was adopted

by social research and

sustainability science in

the recent years. Although

resilience has been

defined multiple times,

the idea remains the same. Although introduced in 35AD, Holling had first defined the term

in the 1970s in ecological studies as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their

ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between

populations or state variables” (Holling 1973). After this it had become popular in other

fields. Agreeing to Holling’s definition, Folke classified the term into three categories- First,

narrow resilience- is conceived as resilience as the ability to the return to a stable equilibrium

and focuses on recovery and constancy. Second is ecosystem and social system which is

understood as the essential capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while

undergoing change so as to still retain fundamentally the same function, structure, identity,

and feedbacks. Lastly the social-ecological resilience refers to the capacity for adaptation,

learning, and self-organization, in addition to the general ability to recover from a

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disturbance. Today, the third conception of resilience as the capacity for adaptation, learning

and self-organisation is the most widely supported definition of the term. Defined by the

United Nations- “The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist,

absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient

manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures

and functions” (UNISDR 2009).

Even though ecology has all these systems defining the root of resilience, the concept is

easier to explain through mechanics. To elaborate, resilience is the capability of a material to

absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and release that energy upon unloading to

return to its original state. This is explained through the stress-strain curve of a material

leading up to its young’s modulus which is the fracture point of that material until which it is

able to revert back to its former state.

In disaster and risk management, resilience is conceived as a concept that applies to socio-

technical systems: it is often not the individual person that is able to do something, but it is

the joint action of individual people, private parties, local and central government that

together provide basic services, prevent harmful events, etc. It is society, and society’s ability

to perform in a certain way in the face of a hazard, which is also referred to as urban

resilience, or neighbourhood resilience, or community resilience depending on the specific

society. Disaster resilience also went through a specific social change in the society during

the second half of the eighteenth century. Rather than acts of God, disasters started to be

perceived as partly preventable. This meant that resilience against these disasters was no

longer a utopian term.

On-going research suggests that resilience science is challenging because the concept itself is

very subjective to its context. This makes developing verified or validated disaster resilience

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measurement tools for different circumstances and making them more routine remain as

important challenges in the quest to make disaster resilience science more mature and

dependable for policy makers and practitioners. Apart from this, the definition of resilience is

constantly evolving and to place a framework that has been verified by longitudinal studies

remains unsuccessful.

To summarise, resilience has a bright future ahead of it as an explanatory concept in various

allied fields that deal with environmental extremes. However, in the race to utilize the term

always broadly, conflicting voices have been raised. Resilience thinking consistently relies on

the assumption that the social order is based upon consensus, while the neoliberal capitalist

system involves dispossession and exploitation, in ways that are inimical to the acquisition of

safety and robust defences against hazards.

As to where current research is headed and what could be the future of resilience is to reduce

risk and improve resilience from all stages of a disaster. It is believed that Resilience studies

and practices for specific disasters will be helpful for resilience enhancement, with a focus on

frequent occurrence disasters, such as earthquakes and climate-related disasters, etc.

Resilience assessment research mainly presents a wide variety of indicators, which is

conducive to putting forward targeted recommendations for resilience enhancement.

Meanwhile, numerous other assessments aid in providing some guidance for the practices of

improving resilience. The combination of this research includes two crucial concepts,

namely, vulnerability and sustainability. Studies on vulnerability are not sufficient to reflect

the whole life cycle of disasters, and the term resilience plays a compensatory role in disaster

research. Moreover, resilience research also promotes sustainable development.

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References:

UNISDR Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction (2009).

https://www.undp.org/content/dam/georgia/docs/publications/GE_isdr_terminology_2009_en

g.pdf.

Holling, C S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology

and Systematics, vol. 4, no. 1, 1973, pp. 1–23.,

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245.

“Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-Ecological Systems Analysis.”

Peopleandtheenvironment, 31 Oct. 2011,

https://peopleandtheenvironment.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/resilience-the-emergence-of-a-

perspective-for-social-ecological-systems-analysis/#:~:text=Folke%20breaks%20down

%20the%20history%20of%20the%20resilience,as%20close%20to%20the%20same%20state

%20as%20possible.

Alexander, David and Ian Davis. “Disaster risk reduction: An alternative

viewpoint.” International journal of disaster risk reduction 2 (2012): 1-5.

Neelke Doorn, Paolo Gardoni & Colleen Murphy (2019) A multidisciplinary definition and

evaluation of resilience: the role of social justice in defining resilience, Sustainable and

Resilient Infrastructure, 4:3, 112-123, DOI: 10.1080/23789689.2018.1428162

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“Disaster Resilience Research.” Disaster Resilience Research | Fischell Department of

Bioengineering, https://bioe.umd.edu/research/disaster-resilience.