Community Resilience

The concept of resilience denotes a system's ability to endure or adapt to natural or anthropogenic disturbances. Applied to human communities that share geographic boundaries and a shared fate, community resilience refers to a group of people's ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from adversity. Since 2000, the concept has gained currency among scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences, as well as among officials from U.S. and international government agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Although definitions of the concept vary, most maintain that resilient communities possess robust social networks that help people to “bounce back” from harm. Community resilience is often depicted as closely linked to other forms of resilience such as individual psychological, ecological, economic, and infrastructural. While a positive development, the ...