Community Resilience: Toward an Integrated Approach

Abstract

We explore opportunities for an integrated approach in community resilience to inform new research directions and practice, using the productive common ground between two strands of literature on community resilience, one from social–ecological systems and the other from the psychology of development and mental health. The first strand treats resilience as a systems concept, dealing with adaptive relationships and learning in social–ecological systems across nested levels, with attention to feedbacks, nonlinearity, unpredictability, scale, renewal cycles, drivers, system memory, disturbance events, and windows of opportunity. The second strand emphasizes identifying and developing community strengths, and building resilience through agency and self-organization, with attention to people–place connections, values and beliefs, knowledge and learning, social networks, collaborative governance, economic diversification, infrastructure, leadership, and outlook. An integrative approach seated in the complex adaptive system and ecological understanding can incorporate the identification of explicit social strengths and connections to place, activated by agency and self-organizing.

Keywords:

• adaptive management
• agency
• community development
• community health
• complex adaptive systems
• panarchy
• resilience
• social learning
• social–ecological systems

Acknowledgments

Berkes's work has been supported by the Canada Research Chairs program (http://www.chairs.gc.ca). Ross's work has been supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Program, and the Australian Government's Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility (MTSRF), through the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. She thanks Desley Hegney, Elizabeth Buikstra, Michael Cuthill, Kirsten Maclean, and other team members and partners for their contributions to our studies of social resilience.