Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

57 foster conceptual clarity and practical relevance some authors have suggested a clear and specified theory of sustainability, which is characterized by both a narrow extension and a clear intension of the term (Kopfmüller et al. 2001, 2006, Ott 2003, Ott and Döring 2004, Kates et al. 2005). These insights indicate that, metaphorically spoken, boundary objects are Janus-faced, i.e. they are inherently ambivalent. They may have positive and negative aspects in terms of scientific progress and political success. What does that mean for a scientific concept of resilience? DISCUSSION In this section we synthesize the points made in the previous sections and discuss some implications for a fruitful conceptual structure of resilience. Resilience is a two-faced concept. On the one hand, the concept is used as a descriptive, ecological concept (e.g., Walker 2002, Gunderson and Holling 2002, Bellwood et al. 2004, Nyström 2006) whereas, on the other hand, it represents a boundary object with a rather wide and vague meaning (e.g., Gunderson and Holling 2002, Adger et al. 2003, Folke 2003, Hughes et al 2005, Folke 2006, Walker et al. 2006). As a result, the original ecological concept of resilience first defined by Holling (1973) has been transformed considerably. This becomes apparent in several points. First, the specific meaning of resilience gets diluted and increasingly unclear. This is due to the use of the concept (a) with many different intensions and (b) with a very wide extension. For example, Hughes et al. (2005) suggest several key components of resilience for marine regions. These include leadership and insight, sustained mobilization of national and international aid, cultural and ecological diversity, development of multiscale social networks, and the resolution of local civil unrest. Apparently, Hughes et al. (2005) apply both the social-ecological definition and the metaphoric definition of resilience (cf., Classes 8a and 9 in Table 1) in order to link an ecological-descriptive meaning of resilience to governance structures, economics and society. As a result, however, the concept of resilience includes very much, from international aid and leadership to ecological diversity, and it is for this reason why the meaning of resilience gets diluted and unclear, as for logical reasons any concept that encompasses very much, i.e., wide extension, must lose specific meaning, i.e., clear intension (Ott 2003). Indeed, regarding the interpretation of resilience put forward by Hughes et al. (2005), it gets difficult to decide whether a certain state is resilient or not or to specify the particular degree of resilience inherent in a certain state. Second, a broad concept of resilience often includes normative dimensions. Following the interpretation of Hughes et al. (2005) resilience represents a hybrid concept containing a blending of descriptive and normative aspects, as international aid, cultural diversity, and the resolution of local civil unrest represent instrumental and eudaemonistic values. The fact that a broad concept of resilience includes normative dimensions is not surprising. We see other boundary objects floating between descriptive and normative meanings, as in the case of biodiversity, i.e., biodiversity in the specific scientific sense of diversity at the level of genes, species, and ecosystems vs. biodiversity in the sense of the ominous value of life on earth (Eser 2002). But the important point is that these normative aspects within a broad concept of resilience ought to be made explicit and, whenever possible, justified ethically (U. Eser and T. Potthast, personal communication). Third, the term resilience is used ambiguously as divergent conceptions of resilience are proposed. There are at least 10 different approaches to resilience. Each approach emphasizes different aspects of resilience with respect to the specific interest. The ecological aspect is stressed by ecologists, whereas the political and institutional aspects are stressed by sociologists, etc. Thus, the term resilience is used ambiguously for fundamentally different intensions (cf., Class 1–10 in Table 1). The direct consequences are trade-offs between social and environmental objectives within a conception of resilience, which may be difficult to handle. Fourth, the original ecological dimension of resilience is about to vanish. Our impression is that recent studies increasingly stress the social, political, and institutional dimensions of resilience (e.g., Folke 2002, Olsson et al. 2004, 2006, Janssen 2006) or address whole social-ecological systems (e.g., Adger et al. 2005, Hughes et al. 2005, Folke 2006, Walker et al. 2006), whereas genuinely ecological studies of resilience get rare (but cf., Bellwood et al. 2004, Nyström 2006). Finally, resilience is increasingly conceived as a perspective, rather than a clear and well-defined concept. Recently, resilience has been conceived either as a way of thinking, as an approach to address social processes, such as social learning, leadership and adaptive governance (cf. Class 8b in Table 1; Folke 2006) or as a metaphor for the flexibility of a social-ecological system over the long term (cf., Class 9 in Table 1; Pickett et al. 2004). According to Anderies et al. (2006), resilience is better described as a collection of ideas about how to interpret complex systems. As a result, the meaning of resilience gets increasingly vague and unspecified. How to evaluate this conceptual development of resilience? We suggest on the one side that both conceptual clarity and practical relevance of resilience are critically at stake. A scientific concept of resilience must have a clear and specified meaning that is constantly used in the same way. In particular, it must be possible (a) to specify the particular objects the concept refers to, (b) to decide whether particular states in nature are resilient or nonresilient and it should be possible (c) to assess the degree of resilience of a certain state (cf., Grunwald 2004a,b, Jax 2006). In fact, the quality of the term resilience is strongly dependent on the ability to exclude phenomena that