Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

80 Figure 3. Distribution of resilience characteristic importance ratings. Figure 4. Number of practitioner definitions referencing resilience characteristics based on coding. critics of resilience discourse and policy argue that resilience, particularly when applied to social systems, is inherently conservative and often employed to prevent positive transformations [62,63,64]. In response to these criticisms, some resilience scholars have incorporated transformation into their conceptualizations of resilience [65]. In academic theory, the trend seems to be away from static, engineering resilience with its emphasis on robust systems [6] towards these more flexible and adaptive forms of resilience. However, the high importance ascribed to robustness by survey respondents, as well as the numerous references in the definitions to ”bouncing back”, suggest that it persists as a dominant line of thinking in ‘on-the-ground’ urban resilience activities. According to the local practitioners surveyed, the characteristic forward-thinking was second only to robustness in terms of average importance. For the purposes of the survey, forward-thinking was defined as “Integrating information about future conditions (i.e.,