Notion Of Resilience Research Articles

Attributes and Characteristics of Regional Resilience: Defining and Measuring the Resilience of Turkish Regions

Eraydin A. Attributes and characteristics of regional resilience: defining and measuring the resilience of Turkish regions, Regional Studies. The increasing frequency of recessionary shocks and the difference in regional growth trajectories in periods of both recession and recovery have resulted in an increased interest in the notion of resilience in the recent literature. This paper, through a discussion of the impacts of recession on Turkish regions, presents an empirical exploration of the concept of regional resilience, categorizing the responses of different regions during economic cycles. A discriminant function analysis is used to explore and explain the differences between resilience categories based on the attributes of the 26 NUTS-II regions, indicating which attributes contribute most to group separation.

The Limits to Resilience? The Impact of Local Government Spending Cuts in London

Compared with other service areas, spending on local government has suffered particularly large cuts under the austerity measures of the Coalition government in England since 2010. This article provides detailed evidence from three London boroughs as to the impacts of these cuts. Following an analysis of the scale and distribution of the cuts, we describe how local authorities have responded, utilising categories of efficiencies, reinvestment and retrenchment. We then address the extent to which these responses demonstrate local authority resilience. We find that the boroughs have demonstrated, in the period covered, a capacity to ‘bounce forward’ from the external shock of the cuts, corresponding to a concept of ‘resilience as transformation’. However, we conclude that a broader notion of resilience is also needed, taking into account not only the nature of organisational responses but also the extent of their capacity to support the needs of residents, which a focus on transformation may too easily obscure.

On Resilient Graph Spanners

We introduce and investigate a new notion of resilience in graph spanners. Let $$S$$S be a spanner of a weighted graph $$G$$G. Roughly speaking, we say that $$S$$S is resilient if all its point-to-point distances are resilient to edge failures. Namely, whenever any edge in $$G$$G fails, then as a consequence of this failure all distances do not degrade in $$S$$S substantially more than in $$G$$G (i.e., the relative distance increases in $$S$$S are very close to those in the underlying graph $$G$$G). In this paper we show that sparse resilient spanners exist, and that they can be computed efficiently.

Resilient practices: a paradox-oriented approach for large-scale development projects

Large-scale development projects are facing a period of change. The notion of resilience has recently been attracting attention from academics and policymakers who are trying to understand how complex systems can navigate a path through such changing times. The usefulness of this concept is critically explored by focusing on the management paradoxes found in these projects. We argue that the global economic crisis once again proved that resiliently managed large-scale development projects have to balance the equally present needs for flexibility and innovation with efficiency and reliability. Projects have to embrace these paradoxes as continuous, crucial, and even productive facts of organisational life. A set of cognitive and operational indicators on different levels of scale are formulated to conduct a pilot study, and guide further empirical research.

Network structure, complexity, and adaptation in water resource systems

Infrastructure systems are often complex. Many have both natural and built components. For such systems, including water resource networks, resilience is a common policy goal. In the formalised study of complex systems, the structure and function of networks can contribute directly to system resilience. One branch of complex systems studies, network science, describes how connectivity between individual components can explain some system-wide properties of growth and reliability. Water resource systems analysis has only begun to apply techniques from network theory and complexity science to assess adaptability and resilience. We present an analysis of connectivity in a network model of California's water infrastructure system using several network science techniques. Results indicate that nodes in California's water system are clustered but without scale-free properties. The network originates from a mixture of top-down (centralised) and bottom-up (dispersed interactions of parties) planning. This structure provides managers greater flexibility to use local and distant water sources. We use the analysis to illustrate how several disciplinary notions of resilience apply to civil infrastructure planning. We also explore how adaptability, not just complexity, influences resilience in planning. Creating systems that can respond to future changes must be an important policy goal in planning civil infrastructure.

Resilience: some philosophical remarks on ostensively and stipulatively defined concepts

The notion of resilience has become widely diffused in sustainability research over the past two decades. This process has not unfolded without contention and critique of the concept has often focused on its content. In this article, we discuss how concepts, including resilience, come to be defined in scientific terms. We distinguish between ostensively defined concepts that point to some phenomena and stipulatively defined concepts where the content is given in the definition itself. We argue that although definitions are remarkably similar across many disciplines where resilience is used—most notably psychology and ecology—they may nonetheless differ in whether they are to be taken as stipulative or ostensive. This situation has interesting consequences for the ways in which different disciplines can be connected and integrated. It is notable that integration on the basis of ostensive definition turns on sharing the extension (the phenomena itself) of the concept, but not necessarily the intension (the definition), whereas integration on the basis of stipulatively defined concepts works in the opposite way.

Resilience, locality and the cultural economy

The aim of this paper is to question the normative interpretations of resilience as they apply to the local cultural economy. The paper has three sections, the first sets out the received notion of resilience that is atomistic and closed (Mode A), and contrasts it with another version (Mode B) which is social and open. The second section reviews some of the important characteristics of the cultural economy and indicates why it is particularly sensitive to local embedding. The third section contrasts resilience informed policy frameworks of Mode A and Mode B. The paper concludes that a form of local capacity building applied to the particularities of the cultural economy, and place, offer a more productive strategy for resilience.

The Role of ‘Persistent Resilience’ within Everyday Life and Polity: Households Coping with Marginality within the ‘Big Society’

As Europe's current economic crisis continues many households are developing new coping strategies in response to the pressures of everyday life. This paper explores such practices within Birmingham's Castle Vale housing estate, drawing on the increasing engagement within the social sciences with notions of resilience. This concept, originating from engineering, psychology, and disaster management, is increasingly used in urban and economic geography, and is becoming influential on state policy. This paper furthers its current usages by proposing the concept of ‘persistent resilience’, whereby households, and their networks, develop responses not just to ‘shocks’, but also to more long-term processes, such as the changing nature of employment and/or responses to constantly altering state policies. This form of resilience has significant policy relevance, as it can be seen, albeit under different names, at the heart of the British government's ‘Big Society’ project, within which communities are to be empowered to steer their development while ‘big government’ withdraws. This paper argues, however, that there is an inherent tension within such assumptions of community-led development, as they do not consider the spaces in which it takes place. As the paper demonstrates, ‘persistent resilience’ is often formed in the semiformal/informal spaces of everyday life, which, in many cases, will be destroyed by cuts to government funding to communities. Thus, the paper calls for a more nuanced, everyday understanding of resilience and the spaces within which it is formed and transmitted.

Recasting resilience beyond 'failure management': lessons for planning our cities

Much recently, the term 'resilience' has generated considerable interest. But, it is rather hard to pin down what it means. Equally challenging is in knowing what the scope of resilience might be and how/whether such an understanding might help address challenges facing our cities, e.g., impacts of climate change, lack of employment opportunities, etc. I argue that in contemporary debates, resilience has been cast largely within the gamut of 'failure management'. Consequently, two challenges emerge. How is failure/success defined, and by whom? This is problematic because: a) failure management by adopting a static notion of resilience does not effectively deal with changes taking place in cities; b) there is the insider-outsider tension in terms of deciding whose failure reflects lack of resilience. Alternatively, a 'pathways to resilience' approach is suggested that sets out, an 'insider' definition of resilient behaviour, that has the potential to adapt if needed, with time.

Revisiting Rome: Analyzing Capture and Governance – Strategy and Structure

The notion of resilience and sustainability has become a major theme in both academic and business-driven environments. Recent research by Carmeli and Markman (2011) elevates this theme by using an...

Understanding and enhancing future infrastructure resiliency: a socio-ecological approach.

The resilience of any system, human or natural, centres on its capacity to adapt its structure, but not necessarily its function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. In the long term, therefore, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving a system's ability to resist an immediate threat or to recover to a stable past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer-term system adaptation in their understanding of resilience. Instead, a short-term, stable system (STSS) perspective on resilience is prevalent. This paper seeks to identify and problematise this perspective, presenting research based on the development of a heuristic 'scenario-episode' tool to address, and challenge, it in the context of United Kingdom infrastructure resilience. The aim is to help resilience practitioners to understand better the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural, malicious threats.

Translating Climate Change: Adaptation, Resilience, and Climate Politics in Nunavut, Canada

This article examines the translation of key terms about climate change from English into Inuktitut, considering not only their literal translation but also the broader context within which words make sense. We argue that notions of resilience, adaptation, and climate change itself mean something fundamentally different in Inuktitut than English and that this has implications for climate policy and politics. To the extent that climate change is translated into Inuktitut as a wholly environmental phenomenon over which humans have no control, both adaptation and resilience come to be seen as appropriate and distinctly Inuit modes of relating to shifting climatic conditions, calling on practices of patience, observation, creativity, forbearance, and discretion. If translated as a matter of unethical harm of sila, however, Inuit frameworks of justice, relationality, and healing would be activated. In the context of a broader global shift away from mitigation and toward enhancing the adaptive capacities and resilience of particular populations, current modes of translating climate change, we argue, are deeply political.

Spatial planning and urban resilience in the context of flood risk

Spatial planning is increasingly being considered as an important mechanism in coping with flood risk due to climate change. One of the reasons for this is that engineering approaches are increasingly expensive and cannot provide complete certainty of protection against climate-related floods. The thesis examines whether and how spatial planning is used in urban areas to promote resilience to flood risk and climate change. In this study, planning is considered as the regulation of physical implementation as well as the process of policy-making that guides spatial development. This process mainly involves the interaction and collaboration between actors (both public and private). The notion of resilience is being used more and more in discussions of complex issues like the impact of climate-related flood risks on spatial development. The interpretations of resilience can vary significantly depending on the local context, the focus of spatial development and the interests of the actors involved in decision- making. The study proposes six characteristics of planning decision-making that can help to promote the resilience of cities. These comprise: (i) considering the current situation, (ii) examining trends and future threats, (iii) learning from previous experience, (iv) setting goals, (v) initiating actions, and (vi) involving the public. The importance of these characteristics over time for policy and practice is examined according to empirical evidence from detailed case study analysis. Six case studies are presented, four in Taiwan and two in the Netherlands. In all of the case studies, the issue of flood risk and spatial development is considered important by policy- makers, but the planning strategies used to tackle climate-related flood risks are often different, as are the experiences of flooding and governance arrangements. The information gathered is primarily based on interviews and the review of planning policies, government reports and research documents. Comparative analysis is a central focus of the study. The analysis has both a national and international perspective, comparing cases within Taiwan and between Taiwan and the Netherlands. The national comparison examines the way in which local planning governance is addressed in shaping decisions to deal with flood risks. This can vary among cases which share similar spatial development objectives and national institutional framework. The international comparison between Taiwan and the Netherlands examines the roles of planning to promote urban resilience in the context of flood risk and climate change. Three conclusions can be drawn. First, the interpretation of resilience is dependent on the views and interests of the actors involved. These change over time and can be seen in different episodes of policy-making. Second, the importance of the different assessment characteristics varies from one case to another. The interests of the leading actors, the interpretations of flood risks and the framework of local collaboration are all major factors that shape these differences. These factors are often associated with planning traditions and relatively stable in resistant to change. Third, when there is a collaborative framework for planning involving multiple actors, the result is a more comprehensive set of strategies in dealing with flood risk.

Scheduling Short-Term Recovery Activities to Maximize Transportation Network Resilience

A stochastic, time-dependent integer program with recursive functions is proposed for the problem of assessing a rail-based freight transportation system’s resilience to disaster events. This work adds to this notion of resilience by explicitly considering that only limited resources will be available to support recovery activities, and their simultaneous implementation assumed in the prior work may not be possible. That is, the order in which recovery actions are taken can greatly affect gains achieved in capacity recovery over time. By developing an optimal schedule for a set of chosen recovery actions for each potential disaster scenario, the proposed model provides a more accurate depiction of the system’s resilience to disaster. Two solution methods are presented, both employing a decomposition approach that eliminates the need for recursive computations. The first is an exact decomposition with branch-and-cut methodology, and the second is a hybrid genetic algorithm that evaluates each chromosome’s fitness based on optimal objective values to the time-dependent maximum flow subproblem. Algorithm performance is assessed on a test network.

Resilience as a Unifying Concept

In sustainability research and elsewhere, the notion of resilience is attracting growing interest and causing heated debate. Those focusing on resilience often emphasize its potential to bridge, integrate, and unify disciplines. This article attempts to evaluate these claims. Resilience is investigated as it appears in several fields, including materials science, psychology, ecology, and sustainability science. It is argued that two different concepts of resilience are in play: one local, the other global. The former refers to the ability to return to some reference state after a disturbance, the latter the maintenance of some property during a disturbance. An implication of this analysis is that the various uses of the resilience concept are more closely related than has been previously been suggested. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a preference towards using highly abstract versions of the concept. This explains the apparent context insensitivity of the concept, but presents a problem for those hoping to establish a research programme based on it.

On the notion of regional economic resilience: conceptualization and explanation

Over the past few years a new buzzword has entered academic, political and public discourse: the notion of resilience, a term invoked to describe how an entity or system responds to shocks and disturbances. Although the concept has been used for some time in ecology and psychology, it is now invoked in diverse contexts, both as a perceived (and typically positive) attribute of an object, entity or system and, more normatively, as a desired feature that should somehow be promoted or fostered. As part of this development, the notion of resilience is rapidly becoming part of the conceptual and analytical lexicon of regional and local economic studies: there is increasing interest in the resilience of regional, local and urban economies. Further, resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea ‘whose time has come’ in policy debates: a new imperative of ‘constructing’ or ‘building’ regional and urban economic resilience is gaining currency. However, this rush to use the idea of regional and local economic resilience in policy circles has arguably run somewhat ahead of our understanding of the concept. There is still considerable ambiguity about what, precisely, is meant by the notion of regional economic resilience, about how it should be conceptualized and measured, what its determinants are, and how it links to patterns of long-run regional growth. The aim of this article is to address these and related questions on the meaning and explanation of regional economic resilience and thereby to outline the directions of a research agenda.

A Review of the Healthy Mindsets for Super Kids Program

The notion of resilience has emerged in the 21st century as an important factor influencing children's responses to adverse events. In the past 10 years, resilience theory and resilience programs for children have flourished globally. ‘Healthy Mindsets for Super Kids’ is a new program aimed at building resilience in children aged 9–14. The program features 10 modules, illustrated by superhero themes, on topics of communication and social skills, anger management, grief and loss, body image, healthy relationships, and positive thinking. This review will introduce the Healthy Mindsets for Super Kids program (Jessica Kingsley publishers, 2014) in use by practitioners in educational, community and mental health settings. It will describe its content, evaluation and the value in building resilience in children at risk of mental health issues.

Pedagogies of the Unknown: Unpacking ‘Culture’ in Disaster Risk Reduction Education

Disaster risk reduction policies make heavy use of education for spreading a ‘culture’ of resilience at community level. This paper reflects on the uncritical way the concept of culture is used in current pedagogies of resilience. It describes how a deterministic/normative vision of culture is gradually giving way to a generative/emergentist approach. Indeed, the notion of resilience has brought with it an idea of culture that emphasizes the flexible and dynamic character of learning. The paper also illuminates the unrecognized potential for disaster education, for it can be used as a tool to absolve public institutions from failure by shifting responsibility for safety to the population. Resilience, in other words, can become a shock absorber that compensates for institutional inefficiency.

Building Resilient Regions: Complex Adaptive Systems and the Role of Policy Intervention

The notion of resilience is being utilised by an increasing number of authors keen to understand the dynamics of local and regional economies and particularly how they deal with economic shocks and recessionary crises. Within the burgeoning literature however, fairly limited attention has been paid to date to developing a robust conceptual understanding of what role policy-makers, particularly at sub-national level, might play in building economic resilience in regions. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap. Drawing on resilience literatures which employ a complex adaptive systems perspective, the paper seeks to develop a conceptual framework within which policy action, particularly at the subnational level, can be theorised and understood. It identifies three critical dimensions which frame the role and scope for policy intervention in the management of regional economic resilience: the modes and structures of governance, the types of policy interventions which help build resilience, and the horizons or timings for appropriate intervention. The paper concludes by considering what this framing means for the nature and scope of subnational policy intervention for regional economic resilience.

Boston bombings and resilience - what do we mean by this?

Boston bombings and resilience - what do we mean by this?