Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

75 The concept of resilience is not new. It has a long history of use in engineering, psychology, and ecology [10]. The urban climate change literature draws heavily on ecological resilience theory originally developed by Holling [11]. In his conceptualization, resilience refers to an ecosystem’s ability to “persist” in the face of a disturbance or change, but this persistence does not necessarily mean that the system remains static [11]. Holling and colleagues used this dynamic ecological resilience concept as the foundation for broader theories of change for social-ecological systems [12]. The explosion in popularity of the term “resilience” has been accompanied by an equally remarkable proliferation of definitions of resilience. Some argue that the concept’s very popularity is owed at least in part to the fact that the meaning of resilience is “infinitely malleable” [13]. Yet scholars have expressed concern that as resilience becomes ubiquitous, the term may lose any real meaning or cause confusion [14]. In this regard, resilience may be comparable to other increasingly ambiguous yet fashionable concepts like sustainability [15]. Undoubtedly, one of the strengths of resilience theory is its applicability across disciplines and ability to serve as a boundary object [16]. This malleability can be a barrier to interdisciplinary collaboration, however, if every discipline has its own idea of what resilience means [17]. The absence of an accepted definition has not stopped researchers from proposing various process- and outcome-focused system characteristics that supposedly enhance climate resilience [9]. However, the lack of a unified understanding of resilience has made it difficult to operationalize the concept or to develop metrics for resilient systems [9,15]. Prior studies have reviewed the academic literature on urban resilience [7,9,18], but it is unclear how scholarly definitions and characteristics compare with those of practitioners. In this paper we attempt to address this gap and advance our knowledge of how climate resilience is understood in both theory and practice. We compare definitions and characteristics of urban climate resilience from a recent review of the academic literature and a survey of local government practitioners from across the U.S. Our analysis reveals some important inconsistencies in how the scholarly literature defines and characterizes urban climate resilience as opposed to how practitioners view the topic, particularly as it relates to recovering and “bouncing back” versus transformation and “bouncing forward”. In addition, practitioner survey responses show a much wider range of interpretations of what resilience means in practice than what is commonly discussed in the scholarly literature. Collectively, the practitioners seem to favor “bouncing back” or engineering definitions of resilience, which we argue could be problematic. Survey results also suggest that practitioners see all sixteen characteristics of resilient systems that we identified in the literature as important, but we find considerable variation in the extent to which practitioners include these characteristics in their own definitions of urban resilience. Ultimately, understanding these synergies and differences in how academics and practitioners are thinking about climate resilience can lay the foundation for more usable resilience research, which is crucial given the scope of the urban climate change challenge. 2. MATERIALS AND METHODS To examine how practitioners and academics conceptualize resilience, we combined an extensive literature review with the results of a 2014 survey of U.S. local government officials. For the literature review, we drew from a broader review of the urban resilience literature [18], which looked at 172 articles from 1973 to 2013 with the terms “urban resilience” and “resilient cities” in the title, abstract, or keywords in order to identify how resilience was conceptualized across the literature. We reviewed these articles, as well as the studies they frequently cited, to identify a list of potential characteristics of resilient urban systems. We then developed a survey instrument to gauge how urban climate change resilience is defined and characterized by practitioners and how this compares to definitions and characteristics in the literature. It should be acknowledged that since urban resilience research and practice is rapidly evolving, new definitions have likely emerged since the research was completed. The survey of local practitioners was conducted as part of a larger project funded by The Kresge Foundation to assess the range of climate adaptation resources and services available to support local climate adaptation (for more information see Nordgren et al. [19]). The online survey was developed and administered by the researchers in collaboration with three nonprofit organizations: ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA (ICLEI), the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) and the National League of Cities (NLC). The survey instrument, which was built using Qualtrics software, was reviewed by members of the Kresge Foundation, the project’s expert advisory committee, and survey experts at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The survey was also piloted with students at the University of Michigan and local government staff members from three communities around the U.S. The final survey was distributed by ICLEI, NLC, and USDN through their membership lists, and ran from 27 March 2014 to 6 May 2014. We are unable to calculate exactly howmany individuals received the survey, since membership in the three organizations administering the survey overlap. However, we estimate that around 1200 distinct individuals working for local governments received the survey. A total of 446 began taking the survey and 291 completed more than three-quarters of the questions. A total of 134 completed the final two questions on resilience that are pertinent to this analysis. Importantly, the survey sample is not representative of the population of cities in the U.S., since communities elect to be members of each of these three organizations. Nevertheless, the survey as a whole did succeed in capturing a wide range of communities: respondents represented 41 states and were well distributed in terms of local jurisdiction size and geographic features. Respondents’ roles in their communities also varied with the largest group (30 percent) working in the energy or environment field (i.e., energy, environmental services, parks, or sustainability staff), followed by 24 percent that serve as elected officials, and 12 percent that work in local government administration.