Abstract
Over the last decade, a growing body of literature has emerged which is concerned with the question of what form a promising concept of social resilience might take. In this article we argue that social resilience has the potential to be crafted into a coherent analytic framework that can build on scientific knowledge from the established concept of social vulnerability, and offer a fresh perspective on today's challenges of global change. Based on a critical review of recently published literature on the issue, we propose to define social resilience as being comprised of three dimensions: 1. Coping capacities —Uiz ability of social actors to cope with and overcome all kinds of adversities; 2. Adaptive capacities — their ability to learn from past experiences and adjust themselves to future challenges in their everyday lives; 3. Transformative capacities — their ability to craft sets of institutions that foster individual welfare and sustainable societal robustness towards future crises. Viewed in this way, the search for ways to build social resilience — especially in the livelihoods of the poor and marginalized — is revealed to be not only a technical, but also a political issue.
Highlights
The notion of resilience has become increasingly prominent in the last decade or so within several academic disciplines and research fields, from biology and engineering to sustainability studies and research into natural hazards and development issues
This paper has focused on the concept of social resilience
This notion shares the key principles of the general resilience concept, which is rooted in and dominated by ecological systems thinking, in its focus on systems’ persistability, adaptability, and transformability
Summary
The notion of resilience has become increasingly prominent in the last decade or so within several academic disciplines and research fields, from biology and engineering to sustainability studies and research into natural hazards and development issues. A growing body of literature has emerged which is concerned with defining what form a promising conceptualization of social resilience might take These developments have been subjected to deep criticism from both natural and social scientists. We want to provide a compass to help researchers to navigate through the increasingly complex body of literature, which will enable them to build on existing knowledge in order to make further progress in this research field. To this end, we investigate the roots of the concept of resilience and outline its genealogy, which leads to the iden-. The article ends with concluding remarks on the development of the concept of social resilience
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