Siambabala Bernard Manyena’s 2006 paper entitled “The Concept of Resilience Revisited” (Disasters, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 433-450, doi:10.1111/j.0361-3666.2006.00331.x) provided a nice summary of alternative definitions for the word “resilience” gleaned from a variety of academic publications (copied below; see original paper for citations).  The number of definitions are fewer than that for the word vulnerability as talked about in my previous post.

• Wildavsky (1991) Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back.
• Holling et al., (1995) It is the buffer capacity or the ability of a system to absorb perturbation, or the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before a system changes its structure by changing the variables.
• Horne and Orr (1998) Resilience is a fundamental quality of individuals, groups and organisations, and systems as a whole to respond productively to significant change that disrupts the expected pattern of events without engaging in an extended period of regressive behaviour.
• Mallak (1998) Resilience is the ability of an individual or organisation to expeditiously design and implement positive adaptive behaviours matched to the immediate situation, while enduring minimal stress.
• Miletti (1999) Local resiliency with regard to disasters means that a locale is able to withstand an extreme natural event without suffering devastating losses, damage, diminished productivity, or quality of life without a large amount of assistance from outside the community.
• Comfort (1999) The capacity to adapt existing resources and skills to new systems and operating conditions.
• Paton, Smith and Violanti (2000) Resilience describes an active process of self-righting, learned resourcefulness and growth—the ability to function psychologically at a level far greater than expected given the individual’s
  capabilities and previous experiences.
• Kendra and Wachtendorf (2003) The ability to respond to singular or unique events.
• Cardona (2003) The capacity of the damaged ecosystem or community to absorb negative impacts and recover from these.
• Pelling (2003) The ability of an actor to cope with or adapt to hazard stress.
• Resilience Alliance (2005) Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future.
• UNISDR (2005) The capacity of a system, community or society potentially exposed to hazards to adapt, by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning and structure. This is determined by the degree to which the social system is capable of organising itself to increase this capacity for learning from past disasters for better future protection and to improve risk reduction measures.

Send post as PDF to