One fits all?

Abstract

Resilience ranks high on the environmentally oriented research agenda on sustainable urban and regional development. The annual “Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation” has become a meeting point for academia and practice. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development uses the term in two of their 17 Sustainable Development Goals, i.e., in Goal No. 9 on infrastructure as a basis for economic development and No. 11 on cities and human settlements. Moreover, resilience has become a prominent topic in the New Urban Agenda. Against this background, the article provides an overview of recent discussion on resilience. It scrutinizes how the concept has been used by different researchers from diverse disciplines with special reference to urban, regional and environmental studies. A systematic literature review on resilience was carried out in order to shed light on recent developments of thought and practice. All in all, 650 articles were reviewed. Following an introduction into the topic and description of the applied methodological approach, different facets of the debate on resilience are presented, and conclusions are drawn. It can be seen that the discussion of resilience needs more specificity, transdisciplinary approaches, and regional contextualization, especially in urban and regional development studies in the countries of the global south.

Towns, High Streets and Resilience in Scotland: A Question for Policy?

“…They also note the same for sustainability, a point also raised by [41]. A systematic review [42] of resilience points to the same conclusions and the contestability of the concept, noting that resilience has become a catchword, which has produced an impressive volume of literature, but within which there are inherent difficulties.…”

Strategies in Times of Pandemic Crisis—Retailers and Regional Resilience in Würzburg, Germany

“…Thus, regional resilience includes both notions of equilibrium and adaptive capacity. Schiappacasse and Müller [36] (p. 57) confirm that in their systematic literature review "the dominating understanding includes resilience as both a state and a process".…”

“…Resilience has been criticized as being a comparatively fuzzy concept as it was developed in the realm of ecological systems being applied in social contexts [10,44]. As such, resilience is positively attributed even in social systems, whereby power relations are negated [34] as stability or equilibrium can mean to stabilize power relations and interests [36] (p. 53). Further criticism of the approach is levelled at its neglect of the role of actor-networks beyond the firm [43,44] and the "agency of actors in the system and how they might shape resilience capacities and emergent outcomes" [14] (p. 927).…”

Academic Research on the 2030 Agenda: Challenges of a Transdisciplinary Field of Study

“…To understand the capillarity of the research on the 2030 Agenda, a first step is to take a look to systematic reviews and bibliometric analyses in the topic. In our research, we have identified 27 reviews so far, where the authors focus on studies of the implementation and the achievement of the SDGs (Barrantes Briceño and Almada Santos, 2019; Guha and Chakrabarti, 2019; Gusmão Caiado et al, 2018; Hristov and Chirico, 2019; Khan et al, 2019; Maroyi, 2018; Merino‐Saum et al, 2018; Omer and Noguchi, 2020; Schiappacasse and Müller, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019), on specific topics and collectives within the Agenda (Baum et al, 2016; Del Pino et al, 2019; Giné‐Garriga et al, 2017; Hartmann et al, 2016; Majinge and Mutula, 2018; Mathez‐Stiefel et al, 2017; Matilla et al, 2018; Simcock and Wittich, 2019; Swamy et al, 2018), on traditional fields of knowledge, now reconsidered in the light of the 2030 Agenda (Elfert, 2019; Rodrigues and Franco, 2019; Storey et al, 2017), and even on contributions to the field of knowledge from researchers in specific regions or countries (Körfgen et al, 2018; Staszkiewicz, 2019).…”