Resilience

The term resilience, as applied outside the discipline of physics, was originally developed as an ecological concept by Crawford Holling to describe the capacity of a system to maintain itself despite disturbances. He specifically used the term as a measure of an ecosystem's ability to absorb change and still persist, contrasting it with the concept of stability of an ecosystem, defined as the ability to return to a state of equilibrium after a temporary disturbance. Hence, an initial clear distinction needs to be made between two meanings of resilience: (1) a system's dynamics when [Page 2438]the system is close to equilibrium (termed by Crawford Holling engineering resilience and relatively identical to the stability property of systems); and (2) the dynamics of a system when it is far from any equilibrium steady state, called ecosystem resilience. The latter term is used interchangeably with other terms, such as ecological resilience or simply resilience, and it is the type of resilience that is discussed in this entry.

Although the theory of resilience is originally ecological in nature, it not only has immense applicability potential in the field of geography but also has been substantially enhanced through multitemporal and cross-scale geographical research. Given the resilience view of the world as a linked socio-ecological system organized hierarchically, the assimilation and further development of resilience theory in the various geographical subdisciplines can contribute not only to increasing unity in geography but also to cementing the role of geography in emerging research directions, such as sustainability science and global environmental change.

Broadly speaking, resilience theory conceptualizes systems as constantly changing, focusing on self-organization, reorganization, and renewal rather than stability, as well as scale, uncertainty, alternate state regimes and threshold effects, and nonlinear responses. With these ideas, resilience theory has changed how mainstream growth and efficiency are perceived both in natural and in anthropogenic systems. If the focus is solely on making growth more efficient, ecosystems and societies alike can become a lot more unstable and vulnerable to external shocks than when these are anticipated and internalized and the focus shifts to include necessary recoveries and reorganization phases. In short, resilience theory advocates that we view systems as governed by constant change, diversity, and multiple regime states and that we make flexibility, learning, and recovery the main components of system-level management and conceptualization.

More recently, the notion of resilience has begun to be used in a vague manner as a research approach to study multiscale and multitemporal social or natural changes or as a boundary object, a concept that facilitates communication across the borders of various scientific disciplines. As a result, resilience has become a complex and multi-interpretable concept employed in an increasingly large range of interdisciplinary work regarding human-environment interactions. Another major conceptual distinction in resilience theory is between ecosystem/ecological resilience and social/socioeconomic resilience, but this divide is being bridged by the increased recognition of the linked nature of social and ecological systems, thus the term socio-ecological resilience. Despite the lack of established approaches to measuring resilience among the disciplines using the concept, Carl Folke has argued that managing for resilience in both ecological and social systems increases the potential of sustaining desirable pathways for development in environments subject to change, in which the future is hard to predict and surprise is likely.

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