Introduction

As the concept of community resilience moves from the margins of practice and theoretical research to more mainstream scholarship, critical issues of conceptualization and use emerge. This is particularly true at the intersection of community development practice and community resilience theory. These key issues are the impetus for this special issue of Community Development. The guest editors and authors have teased out limitations with current conceptualizations of community resilience, offered enhanced or alternative conceptualizations, and presented compelling case studies of new conceptualizations in action.

The first set of articles by Kirkpatrick, Jedd, and Haggard et al. address an ongoing tension within community resilience between disaster resilience within a community context and community resilience from a more holistic “general resilience” perspective. The extant literature on resilience, and community resilience in particular, provides useful frameworks for responding to specific disasters, or building specific resilience (Arup, 2014; Biggs et al., 2012; Cabell & Oelofse, 2012; Simonsen et al., n. d.). This type of resilience is most closely linked to emergency preparedness or disaster planning and tends to be reactive rather than proactive (National Academy of Sciences, 2012). However, the emphasis on specific resilience means our existing frameworks prepare us primarily for disturbances that have already been experienced – often natural, technical, or epidemiological disasters. Specific resilience building focuses on bolstering particular systems related to specific disasters. Specific resilience does not provide sufficient guidance or principles for general resilience building.

General resilience, as defined by Carpenter et al. (2012), is concerned with adapting to complex unknown, unprecedented, and unexpected disturbances. Furthermore, general resilience is focused on bolstering a diverse range of systems to increase their interconnectedness, responsiveness, and efficacy to all potential types of disaster or shock, short- and long-term (Kais & Islam, 2016). This type of resilience concentrates on moving the needle in terms of community capacity and wellbeing and tends to be proactive. For example, general resilience might involve a community working toward a robust educational system to increase human capacity, or building a robust food system to reduce food insecurity to improve population health. These types of broader systems are often left out of the disaster resilience conversation or relegated to the margins, because communities are dealing with crises. A sole focus on specific resilience to particular disturbances leaves a system vulnerable to any disturbance that it has not yet experienced, or at least anticipated. In contrast, adaptive capacity within a community resilience framework is a key way to conceptualize this broader, more general understanding of resilience.

The second set of articles by Cavaye and Ross, Cafer et al., and Green et al. moves the community resilience conversation forward in terms of what it has to offer community development practitioners – presenting examples, a theoretical framework, and methodologies for measuring resilience. The most salient theme here is that community resilience is about more than disaster resilience and, as practitioners, we need to understand what that means relative to community development practice. Importantly, this selection of articles offers methods to systematically approach work around a more holistic idea of community resilience. The final set of articles by Steiner et al. and Shenk et al. provides two accessible examples of how to use community resilience, conceptualized as a broader process designed to bolster systems for adaptive capacity.

The editors conclude the issue with a series of book reviews. Having go-to readers for use in both practice and teaching are critical in continuing to develop community resilience as a theoretical approach to community development practice as well as refine its use as a tool for addressing systems level capacity at the community level. These books were identified by editors as foundational readings that might be utilized in courses on community resilience or those in which community resilience is a unifying theme. The most comprehensive of these, The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval, was reviewed from both a student and faculty perspective for use in teaching.

This special issue was assembled as a starting place for scholarly conversations about the role of community resilience in community development practice. These frameworks presented here, and in other outlets, will continue to gain more support in academic and nonacademic arenas as resilience rhetoric increases in popularity. However, it is crucial for community practitioners to use these frameworks to actively cultivate resilience in their communities by building adaptive capacity in systematic ways. With an eye to building adaptive capacity, practitioners and academics alike should work with communities to revisit or build local, regional, and state level policies with adaptive capacity foci. Also important is the future of community resilience theory and the growing need for real world examples of community resilience, as conceptualized here. To move the field of community resilience forward, it is critical to understand the nuances of context and conditions in communities and how broader conceptualizations of resilience account for and utilize context to build adaptive capacity.