Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

210 Presently, the fourth wave is said to be in ascendance, as the discoveries of the first three waves become assimilated with more sophisticated methods of investigation to develop a richer understanding of the multilevel, contextualized, and dynamic nature of resilience (e.g., Kassis, Artz, Moldenhauer, Geczey, &Rossiter, 2015). Using Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) human ecology theory, an ecological understanding of resilience places both the individual and the adversity within a dynamic multilevel context, where the impact of higher level factors (e.g., social, economic, cultural) on factors proximal to children is emphasized (Cassen, Feinstein, & Graham, 2009). Resilience itself is not a unified concept, and a long history of controversy means that there is little consensus on its precise meaning. The only feature common to most definitions used by academic authors (see Table 1) is that resilience assumes adversity and is relative to it (Noltemeyer & Bush, 2013). Exactly how resilience relates to adversity is conceptualized in a variety of ways, including helping people and communities adapt to adversity, interact with it, or transform aspects of it. A further complication is that the understanding of resilience and how it relates to adversity also depend upon the nature of adversity (whether defined explicitly or implicitly), which may or may not be related to social disadvantage. Table 1. Definitions of Resilience in Research-Based Resilience Literature. As shown in Table 1, there are 17 subtly distinct conceptualizations of resilience that we have counted in use by academic authors. Only three of these definitions include any potential to alter aspects of the wider adversity context, which are those of Hart, Gagnon, Aumann, and Heaver (2013); Lerner (2006); and Ungar (2008). For instance, the notions of “navigating” and “negotiating” hold the potential to have some influence over the availability of resources for others (Ungar, 2008, p. 225). Similarly, the notion of “reciprocally influential relations between a person” and his or her environment (Lerner, 2006, p. 40) captures at least some potential for the environmental context itself to be altered. However, presenting such exchanges as mutually beneficial fails to acknowledge the extent to which structural power imbalances consistently undermine the efforts of those facing the most profound disadvantage.