The Rise of Resilience

Beyond “bouncing back”: Towards an integral, capability‐based understanding of organizational resilience

“…This temporal differentiation allows us to “assign order and rationality to the very messy, complex reality of natural or technological disasters, and human responses to them” (Richardson, : 27) and is therefore suitable for guiding disaster management strategies. The commonly agreed‐upon phase model—the Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM) model by the United States National Governors' Association ()—differentiates among four different phases: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery (Boin et al, ; Cronstedt, ; Khan, Vasilescu, & Khan, ). This differentiation already indicates the significance of resistance and containment while also highlighting the importance of recovery.…”

“…Now, 30 years later, we find many proposals building on the same idea, using terms such as offense and defense resilience (Mamouni‐Limnios & Mazzarol, ), active and passive resilience (Somers, ), or basic and reflexive resilience (Bonß, ). However, “it is fair to say that we have not moved very far beyond the territory staked out by Wildavsky” (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, : 7). There is still confusion about analytical levels ranging from individuals to teams and organizations to networks.…”

Urban resilience implementation: A policy challenge and research agenda for the 21st century

“…However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it (Chandler & Coaffee, ). Whilst there is a variety of different interpretations given to resilience from practitioners and an open debate about resilience principles and characteristics in academia, we adopt the crisis and disaster management definition of “the capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, ; p. 9). By developing resilience, a system becomes capable of reducing the impact of shocks and resuming normal functioning more quickly following a disaster and better equipped to meet population needs and minimise economic losses caused by crises (Lagadec, ; Meerow, Newell, & Stults, ).…”

From Defense to Resilience: Environmental Security beyond Neo-liberalism

“…In contrast, the idea of defense, and in fact pre‐emption or preparedness, requires the singling out of a very particular threat (that is, requires the suspending of uncertainty). The concept of resilience has a pre‐history to its recruitment to security politics, making its way through academic disciplines such as engineering, ecology, computing, psychology, and economics, referring in various ways to the capacity of an entity or system to withstand shocks, recover, adapt, or in some cases learn, evolve, or move to a new systemic equilibrium while maintaining basic functions (Bodin and Wiman ; Walker, Holling, Carpenter and Kinzig ; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche and Pfefferbaum ; Boin, Comfort and Demchak ; Rogers ). But relatively recently, it has entered security policy discourse in various ways, including in national security policy (US Department Of Homeland Security ; HM Government ), disaster‐preparedness, critical infrastructure policy (Thomas and Kerner ; Lundborg and Vaughan‐Williams ; O'Malley ), and with international organizations aiming to manage “global risks” such as climate change and financial instability (UN ; WEF ).…”