Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

58 do not meet this term, as both operationalization and application with respect to environmental management are strongly dependent on a clear and delimited meaning of the term (Pickett et al. 2004). On the other side, however, we propose that the increased vagueness and malleability of resilience is highly valuable because it is for this reason that the concept is able to foster communication across disciplines and between science and practice (cf., Eser 2002). Therefore, it is not the suggestion to eradicate this vagueness and ambiguousness entirely but to grasp the ambivalent character of boundary objects and, hence, of a wide and vague use of resilience. To counterbalance the positive and negative aspects of the conceptual development of resilience we, thus, argue for division of labor in a scientific sense. Resilience, conceived as a descriptive concept, should be a clear, well defined, and specified concept that provides the basis for operationalization and application within ecological science. For the sake of clarity, this meaning may be dubbed ecological resilience/ecosystem resilience, for ecological systems, or just resilience if applied to systems other than ecological, e.g., climatic systems. In contrast, resilience conceived as a boundary object should be designed in a manner to foster interdisciplinary work. In this sense, resilience constitutes a vague and malleable concept that is used as a transdisciplinary approach to analyze social-ecological systems. For greater clarity this meaning may be termed social-ecological resilience (as in Folke 2006).