Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

50 Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object by Fridolin Simon Brand and Kurt Jax This article was originally published in Ecology & Society, 12(1), 2007. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. ABSTRACT This article reviews the variety of definitions proposed for “resilience” within sustainability science and suggests a typology according to the specific degree of normativity. There is a tension between the original descriptive concept of resilience first defined in ecological science and a more recent, vague, and malleable notion of resilience used as an approach or boundary object by different scientific disciplines. Even though increased conceptual vagueness can be valuable to foster communication across disciplines and between science and practice, both conceptual clarity and practical relevance of the concept of resilience are critically in danger. The fundamental question is what conceptual structure we want resilience to have. This article argues that a clearly specified, descriptive concept of resilience is critical in providing a counterbalance to the use of resilience as a vague boundary object. A clear descriptive concept provides the basis for operationalization and application of resilience within ecological science. Keywords: boundary object; definition; descriptive concept; ecological resilience; resilience; sustainability; typology. INTRODUCTION The concept of resilience is one of the most important research topics in the context of achieving sustainability (Perrings et al. 1995, Kates et al. 2001, Foley et al. 2005). First introduced as a descriptive ecological term (Holling 1973), resilience has been frequently redefined and extended by heuristic, metaphorical, or normative dimensions (e.g., Holling 2001, Ott and Döring 2004, Pickett et al. 2004, Hughes et al. 2005). Meanwhile, the concept is used by various scientific disciplines as an approach to analyze ecological as well as social-ecological systems (Anderies et al. 2006, Folke 2006). As such, it promotes research efforts across disciplines and between science and policy. However, both conceptual clarity and practical relevance are critically in danger. The original descriptive and ecological meaning of resilience is diluted as the term is used ambiguously and in a very wide extension. This is due to the blending of descriptive aspects, i.e., specifications of what is the case, and normative aspects, i.e., prescriptions what ought to be the case or is desirable as such. As a result, difficulties to operationalize and apply the concept of resilience within ecological science prevail. This, in turn, impedes progress and maturity of resilience theory (cf., Pickett et al. 1994:57). The success of the concept in stimulating research across disciplines on the one side and the dilution of the descriptive core on the other raises the fundamental question what conceptual structure we want resilience to have. This article is divided into four parts. The first section offers a typology to structure the numerous definitions of resilience proposed within sustainability science. Using this typology as a background, the second section investigates inmore detail a descriptive, ecological concept of resilience viewed from both a formal and an operational perspective. Subsequently, the third section examines the use of resilience as a rather vague boundary object and points to some chances and pitfalls. The fourth section concludes with final thoughts on the recent conceptual development and a fruitful conceptual structure of resilience. A TYPOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS OF RESILIENCE In what follows we suggest a typology for the variety of definitions of resilience used in sustainability science. The typology is based on the analysis of key papers published in the last 35 yr (cf., Janssen et al. 2006). It provides the background for discussing the conceptual development of resilience. Before turning to the definitions in detail some words on the terminology used are in order. First, two distinct meanings of resilience must be distinguished. The first one refers to dynamics close to equilibrium and is defined as the time required for a system to return to an equilibrium point following a disturbance event. It has been coined engineering resilience (Holling 1996) and is largely identical to the stability property, i.e., elasticity (Grimm and Wissel 1997). The second meaning of resilience refers to dynamics far from any equilibrium