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In science, the resilience concept has increasingly been embraced as a framework for disaster-related work. As a result, policy supports 'resilient communities' programs. The current transition from a 'descriptive' scientific concept explaining the state of a system to a 'normative' agenda applied by local authorities faces various challenges. To contribute to the A|Z journal's special issue on Cities at Risk, this paper argues that it is crucial to address and explain these challenges in order to effectively increase resilience. It examines some theoretical foundations and underlying assumptions of the resilience concept and highlights some challenges associated with practical application in urban locations. Most importantly, the chronic needs and root causes of vulnerability will remain unsolved and will continue to generate vulnerable groups as long as efforts to increase resilience ignore the preconditions and root causes of (what is effectively social and political) vulnerability. Building resilience in cities provides opportunities to address under-studied elements, to gain understanding about the historical and socio-political processes that create and maintain social vulnerabilities, and to develop designs capable of identifying options for intervention and leverage points that can move communities toward less vulnerable development pathways.

This paper sets out a number of lessons to be learned about the policy challenges associated with the resilience concept. In fact, these are more accurately described as lessons observed because they are not lessons learned until they are implemented. Consequently, this paper identifies a number of challenges for policy makers and it does so by setting those issues within the conceptual framework of a resilience continuum whereby individual nation states and civil-societies can be at different stages of resilience at any given time. Resilience is part of a complex integrated dynamic system influenced by a range of different actors and variables at any given time. The first challenge for policy makers is to understand the way policy issues are framed and, correspondingly, the way resilience is framed as part of any response mechanism to address a given policy problem. A critical lesson is the importance of determining whom or what needs to be made resilient against what threat or risk as part of a resilience continuum. This presents a number of significant and complex decisions regarding the allocation of finite resources. Associated with this issue is the recognition that some parts of the system of a nation state or its civil society may fail or, indeed, be allowed to fail. This holds a number of ethical challenges for policy-makers. A key lesson to be learned is that by ascribing resilience as a desirable goal, there need to be clear milestones to indicate stages of achievement. Currently this is a significant omission in policy papers and implementation strategies. This paper also highlights that by adopting the resilience concept, a greater number of actors will be involved and co-opted as part of a wider shared responsibility for its implementation. Particular attention is given to the roles of organisations, as part of the critical infrastructure sector, as potential enablers or inhibitors of resilience. This is an area that requires further research.

The 2016 Global Strategy (GS) made resilience central to the European Union's (EU's) external activities. However, many aspects of resilience were ambiguous. Three of these aspects are identified in this article: whether resilience is about risks or resources, whether resilience means stability or change, and what is the role of values. These ambiguities created a space for the policy work of EU bureaucracy. This work is examined in development and neighbourhood fields, and in relations with Russia. Documents' analysis and semi-structured interviews reveal a difference in how three ambiguities were interpreted. Differences were identified among policy fields but not between EU institutions. These differences reflect the efforts of EU officials to preserve consistency in 'their' fields. This policy work undermines one important goal for introducing resilience in the GS, the enhanced coherence of EU external activities. Finally, the study revealed that some interpretations moved closer to the theoretical writings on resilience compared with the GS.

Resilience is an increasingly present term in contemporary media and scientific discourse. The understanding of this term is achieved by placing it in the immediate linguistic context and by identifying other terms of the lexico-semantic field in which the term resilience falls. In this sense, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, which allow addressing and understanding the complexity of the modern world and the present, could support us in our quest to explain and understand this term with a complex semantics and applicability in several fields of life and science.

AbstractDriven by the academia‐industry co‐identified need to discover new keystones for optimizing organizational crisis communication and management decision‐making, this concept paper proposes a new "READINESS" model. Grounded in the organizational preparedness and resilience literature and drawing predominantly from crisis communication and strategic conflict management elements, READINESS is examined as a multidimensional construct with multilevel efficacy, mental adaptability, and emotional leadership‐focused mindset, with a dynamic process‐driven agility at its core. Another tenet is that READINESS is not just for crises but also essential to manage threats, risks, conflicts, and crises across the board, constantly shaped by complex informational environments and polarizing sociopolitical issues. We begin by articulating READINESS and then illustrate its application in sticky crisis situations, followed by directions for future research, practice, and training innovation and optimization.

The aim of this article is to use a new research concept, referred to as resilience, in rural development (rural resilience) in the context of the often discussed concept of urban resilience. The concept of urban resilience is recognized as a tool for strategic diagnosis and monitoring of cities. In studies of urban resilience for cities of various sizes, quantitative research is most often used. The author, on the basis of literature discussions and own research, presents the use of qualitative research in the assessment of urban resilience for the national network of Cittaslow cities. The concept of urban resilience refers to "a resilient city", especially in the case of a collective criterion (i.e., urban quality policy). Seven groups of criteria in the matrix of urban development self-assessment are the basis for the evolutionary changes in the resilience of individual cities and the entire network. In the case of Cape Clear Island in Ireland, qualitative research of rural resilience was based on global indicators of economic, social and environmental capital proposed by Wilson. Despite the subjectivism of respondents, results of qualitative research allow for making strategic decisions for the purposes of obtaining specific development balance points and selecting specific paths for the Island's development. Both quantitative and qualitative research — their practical dimension — should be used to build community resilience.

AbstractThis commentary compares the concept of resilience as conceptualized and studied in ambiguous loss and in the broader domain of developmental resilience science. The discussion highlights common roots, similarities and differences in the definitions of resilience and protective processes, and implications for interventions. Resilience concepts in ambiguous loss theory are congruent with contemporary developmental resilience theory in multiple ways. Future research and practice would benefit from further integration of these compatible perspectives on resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the variety of definitions, concepts, and theories of psychological resilience. To this end, the narrative is divided into three main sections. The first considers how resilience has been defined in the psychology research literature. Despite the construct being operationalized in a variety of ways, most definitions are based around two core concepts: adversity and positive adaptation. A substantial body of evidence suggests that resilience is required in response to different adversities, ranging from ongoing daily hassles to major life events, and that positive adaptation must be conceptually appropriate to the adversity examined in terms of the domains assessed and the stringency of criteria used. The second section examines the conceptualization of resilience as either a trait or a process, and explores how it is distinct from a number of related terms. Resilience is conceptualized as the interactive influence of psychological characteristics within the context of the stress process. The final section reviews the theories of resilience and critically examines one theory in particular that is commonly cited in the resilience literature. Future theories in this area should take into account the multiple demands individuals encounter, the meta-cognitive and -emotive processes that affect the resilience-stress relationship, and the conceptual distinction between resilience and coping. The review concludes with implications for policy, practice, and research including the need to carefully manage individuals' immediate environment, and to develop the protective and promotive factors that individuals can proactively use to build resilience.

Since the early work on defining and analyzing resilience in domains such as engineering, ecology and psychology, the concept has gained significant traction in many fields of research and practice. It has also become a very powerful justification for various policy goals in the water sector, evident in terms like flood resilience, river resilience, and water resilience. At the same time, a substantial body of literature has developed that questions the resilience concept's systems ontology, natural science roots and alleged conservatism, and criticizes resilience thinking for not addressing power issues. In this study, we review these critiques with the aim to develop a framework for power‐sensitive resilience analysis. We build on the three faces of power to conceptualize the power to define resilience. We structure our discussion of the relevant literature into five questions that need to be reflected upon when applying the resilience concept to social–hydrological systems. These questions address: (a) resilience of what, (b) resilience at what scale, (c) resilience to what, (d) resilience for what purpose, and (e) resilience for whom; and the implications of the political choices involved in defining these parameters for resilience building or analysis. Explicitly considering these questions enables making political choices explicit in order to support negotiation or contestation on how resilience is defined and used.