Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

53 adaptive cycles, i.e., r-, K-, Ω-, and α-phases, which occur on each level of a system’s hierarchy. Against this background, resilience represents a quantitative property that changes throughout the adaptive cycle and principally occurs on each level of a system’s hierarchy (Holling 2001, Gunderson and Holling 2002). Class 4: Operational definition To apply the concept of resilience to empirical cases, it is critical to specify resilience of “what to what” (Carpenter et al. 2001). This operational definition constitutes the first step to make resilience concrete. Further operational steps suggest focusing on the concept of identity and defining resilience as “the ability of the system to maintain its identity in the face of internal change and external shocks and disturbances” (Cumming et al. 2005). Sub-category Ib: Social sciences Class 5: Sociological definition Some scientists apply the concept of resilience to social systems. Social resilience is defined as ”the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political, and environmental change” (Adger 2000:347). Class 6: Ecological-economical definition In addition, the concept of resilience is used to analyze economy-environment systems (e.g., Perrings and Walker 1997, Perrings and Stern 2000, Brock et al. 2002, Perrings 2006). Resilience matches the “transition probability between states as a function of the consumption and production activities of decision makers” (Brock et al. 2002:273) or “the ability of the system to withstand either market or environmental shocks without loosing the capacity to allocate resources efficiently” (Perrings 2006:418). Category II: Hybrid concept Class 7: Ecosystem services-related definition In this hybrid sense, resilience corresponds to the underlying capacity of an ecosystem to maintain desirable ecosystem services in the face of human use and a fluctuating environment (Carpenter 2001, Folke et al. 2002). Studies focus on desirable ecosystem services of an ecological system, e.g., food production, water purification, or aesthetic enjoyment (MEA 2005). Class 8: Social-ecological system. Many scientists state that it is critical to apply the concept of resilience to coupled social-ecological systems, as it may be a fundamental error of environmental policy to separate the human system from the natural system and treat them as independent (e.g. Folke et al. 2002, Anderies et al. 2006, Walker et al. 2006). The nature-culture split is seen as arbitrary and artificial; humans are regarded as part of the ecosystem (Westley et al. 2002, Berkes et al. 2003). Class 8a: Social-ecological definition Social-ecological resilience is defined as “the capacity of social-ecological systems to absorb recurrent disturbances (...) so as to retain essential structures, processes and feedbacks” (Adger et al. 2005:1036). In this approach, a system analysis tends to incorporate specific values, e.g., cultural diversity or international aid. Consequently, there is an increase in the degree of normativity, i.e., resilience gets more and more desirable as such. Class 8b: Resilience approach Recently, resilience has been increasingly conceived as a perspective, as a way of thinking to analyze linked social-ecological systems (Folke 2006). No clear definition is suggested. Rather, resilience is conceived as a collection of ideas about how to interpret complex