Making Sense of Resilience

Abstract

While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for reforming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosystem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clarifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience.

A resilience sensing system for the biosphere

“…The concept of 'resilience' has a long history in ecology, where different authors have adopted different definitions [2,[31][32][33]. Recent, more widespread use of 'resilience' in diverse contexts, including normatively (as a desired feature), has led to yet more disparate meanings [34,35]. Furthermore, existing efforts to quantify 'resilience' from remotely sensed data use different definitions of resilience and different ways of measuring it (table 1).…”

Offsetting Present Risks, Preempting Future Harms, and the Ethics of a ‘New Normal’

“…Second, there is the ethics of resilience (Cañizares et al, 2021). This is a set of ethical issues related to how resilience can or should be achieved in essential parts of human life.…”

Rhetorics of Resilience and Extended Crises: Reasoning in the Moral Situation of Our Post-Pandemic World

“…However, following the social turn, resilience began to be interpreted as a more general capacity to withstand various kinds of uncertain stresses and shocks, or combinations of them, at various scales and over an indefinite period -what is known as general resilience (Carpenter et al, 2012). General resilience has increasingly attracted attention in contexts such as urban adaptation to climate change or risk management (Cañizares et al, 2021), where the concern is not primarily with single stressors or shocks, but rather with bundles of stressors that appear and disappear or become latent, spanning from the individual to (immediately, through spillovers and cascading effects) the global. Consequently, it is nowadays common to find multi-scalar and general approaches to the resilience of, for example, communities, cities or economies (Norris et al, 2008;Rockefeller Foundation and Arup, 2016).…”

“…the above quoted definition by Walker et al (2004); also (Anderies et al, 2013;Elmqvist et al, 2019). Recently, however, this characterization of resilience has been criticized as incoherent, since, in most if not all its applications, resilience is used as a goal or principle for framing and guiding risk management strategies (Cañizares et al, 2021). This is especially the case in social applications of resilience, which necessarily involve explicitly normative decisions and, moreover, tend to frame resilience as a positive feature or ability (Olsson et al, 2015;Thorén & Olsson, 2017).…”

“…Those who view resilience as a descriptive term often refer to the fact that resilience can denote both positive and negative, moral and immoral, phenomena -there are resilient ecosystems, but also resilient tyrannies (Anderies et al, 2013). While it is unclear that this argument suffices for situating resilience as descriptive (Cañizares et al, 2021), the argument is nonetheless irrelevant in the pandemic context -the tropes of resilience reviewed above present it as a positive feature, and so, as an evaluative term. Moreover, these understandings of resilience are also generally used for implicitly or explicitly making prescriptions.…”