Resilience as a Unifying Concept

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Johannes Persson, Lennart Olsson, and James McAllister as well as two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments and suggestions in developing this manuscript. Furthermore I am in a debt of gratitude to Paul Robinson, Brian Hepburn, and the research seminars at the centres of excellence LUCID at Lund University and TINT at Helsinki University, as well as the seminar at the Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus University, where earlier version of this paper was presented. This work was supported by the Linnaeus programme LUCID (Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability, www.lucid.lu.se), FORMAS 2008-1718. Moreover this research benefited greatly from discussions within the research project, ‘Measuring, Assessing and Profiling (MAP) Human Resilience’, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (contract no. 2012 RLC 304).

Notes

[1] Other fields are represented as well, such as medicine and economics, but to a diminished extent in comparison. All in all, Web of Science finds only 51 papers published before 1970.

[2] See Rutter (1993) for a discussion of the merits of resilience with respect to invulnerability. See also Rutter (1985), Garmezy (1991), and Olsson et al. (2003).

[3] Fogany et al. consider resilience to be ‘normal development under difficult conditions’ (Fogany et al. quoted in Daniels 2008, 60)

[4] This variety of resilience is used by Bonanno et al. (2007): they use the term to denote the ‘capacity to maintain healthy, symptom-free function … following PTEs’ (181).

[5] See for instance Dyer and McGuinness (1996). They endorse a version of the concept closer to the usages common in material science: resilience as the ‘process whereby people bounce back from adversity and go on with their lives’ (Dyer and McGuinness 1996, 277).

[6] Around 1970 critical voices were raised—among them Holling, as discussed below—and by the end of the 1980s the thesis had been largely discredited. For discussion of this debate see Schrader-Frachette and McCoy (1993); Redfearn and Pimm (2000); Justus (2008); deLaplante and Picasso (2011). For a detailed overview of the various stability concepts in ecology, Grimm and Wissel (1997) is an excellent resource, while Hansson and Helgesson (2003) have developed a context-independent and parsimonious account of the concept of stability.

[7] Holling's (1973) paper, published in an ecological journal, has to date had over 2000 citations. Until 1998 it had between 10 and 30 citations a year, but since then the number of citations has grown almost exponentially, with almost 230 in 2013 alone.

[8] The relationship between resilience and sustainability is contested, although the connection is often made. See for example Common and Perrings (1992); Lélé (1998); Perrings (2006); and Derissen, Quaas, and Baumgärtner (2011).

[9] If one does prefer to consider the ‘effect side’ of disturbances, it is important that D and I concern different parameters, or properties, of the system. In cases where they are identical the system cannot be perturbed without changing and thus, trivially, is not resilient at all.

[10] Are there senses of resilience that might have been missed? As I have spelled them out here, global and local resilience are roughly equivalent to two of the three senses of stability that Hansson and Helgesson identify. In their terminology, robustness denotes the ‘tendency of a system to remain unchanged, or nearly unchanged, when exposed to perturbations’; they reserve the term ‘resilience’ for the ‘tendency of a system to recover or return to (or close to) its original state after a perturbation’ (Hansson and Helgesson 2003, 222). The third sense, which they call constancy, is non-dynamic; it describes the historical property of not changing. I have found no uses of the term ‘resilience’ that correspond to constancy, which was only to be expected. The word ‘resilience’ has roots in the Latin resilire, which means to jump or to bound back. In other words, dynamics appear to be at the heart of the concept. Since stability is a more abstract concept, I believe that the two senses of resilience presented above capture the vast majority of resilience concepts.

[11] For values of R some distance from the critical R₂ the system has a buffer of sorts and may therefore absorb disturbances to a number of variables and parameters without much in the way of consequence. The closer R is to R₂, however, the more probable it becomes that an otherwise minor disturbance might push the system beyond this boundary, causing an outbreak.

[12] Adger seeks to resolve this problem by drawing up a distinction between migration that is circular and seasonal, and migration that is not. The former, he argues, is a ‘strategy for risk spreading at the household level’ and may thus be an important constituent in resilience (Adger 2000, 357). This is unconvincing in my view. Disturbances that are highly regular are usually considered parts of the system itself. Given this, resilience concerns the ability of a system to absorb irregular (though sometimes recurring) stress. Unless migration is removed from consideration by stipulation, no conceptual barrier prevents us from viewing it as a sign of resilience.

[13] This may well change, but currently one social science journal dominates, according to Web of Science, and that is Ecology and Society. This should come as a surprise to no one, as this journal is the main voice of the Resilience Alliance. Mainstream social science has not taken notice of this, however. Among the 10 highest-ranked journals in economics, social science, and political science, respectively, I found no hits on searches for the terms ‘resilience’ and ‘ecology’ and only six hits between the 30 of the terms ‘resilience’ and ‘system’.

[14] Multiple realizability is an idea originating within the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. Putnam (1967) introduced the notion in the course of presenting an argument to rebut reductionist claims. See also Fodor (1974).

[15] The empirical validity of this thesis has come into question, especially as it pertains to mental kinds (Bechtel and Mundale 1999; Richardson 2009). This does not matter in the case of abstract notions, however.