Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

83 mentioned integration in their definitions. For example, one noted that resilience suggests an approach “to foster integrative—cross sector, cross discipline—solutions.” Another definition did not use the term integration but noted that to be resilient they would need to “include climate adaptation in all of our future planning functions—capital plans, resource allocation, stormwater, etc.” Similarly, another respondent highlighted the importance of “regular communications between all sectors and with and among the community”. Overall, scholars and practitioners seem to agree on the importance of supporting ecological systems, equity, and integrated planning for urban resilience, so there is some common ground for collaboration or knowledge exchange. However, there are a number of other theorized characteristics that practitioners see as relatively less important, or that have been called into question by other scholars. In particular, practitioners’ emphasis on robustness, which is associated with an engineering or “bounce back” conceptualization of resilience, may be problematic. 5. CONCLUSIONS Academic researchers and policymakers are increasingly focused on the concept of urban resilience. Arguably, resilience now rivals sustainability as a major organizing principle or “buzzword” for urban research and policy [76]. Resilience is especially predominant in the climate change discourse, since it is fundamentally about coping with disturbances and change [9]. The challenge is that resilience, like sustainability, is a “fuzzy concept” that is not easily defined or measured [77]. Indeed, it is clear from our comparative analysis of the literature on urban climate resilience and the results of a survey of U.S. local government respondents that academics and practitioners define and characterize urban climate resilience quite differently (Table 4). This points to a disconnect between academic theory and practice. Although local government decision-makers generally confirmed the importance of the 16 resilience characteristics commonly discussed in the academic literature (and did not suggest many others), when prompted to define resilience, they did not incorporate most of these characteristics into their definitions. Furthermore, the characteristics that were rated most important on average did not necessarily match those that are cited most frequently in the practitioners’ definitions of resilience or those frequently discussed in the academic literature. For example, diversity, flexibility, and redundancy are considered fundamental to resilience in the scholarly literature, yet they are rarely mentioned in practitioners’ definitions. Conversely, robustness, which is more controversial in the resilience literature, was rated as the most important characteristic in the survey. It is also interesting that many practitioners still use a more engineering, or “bounce back” conceptualization of resilience, while the scholarly literature seems to be moving towards a “bouncing forward” conceptualization. This is consistent with the findings of other studies [29], and bolsters criticisms that resilience policy and discourse is overly focused on maintaining the status quo and therefore inherently conservative [63,78,79]. This is particularly disheartening for those who do not think our cities are currently sustainable and would like to see transformative urban change. Table 4. Some key differences in how academics and practitioners conceptualize urban resilience. These findings highlight several avenues for future research. First, it would be interesting to survey urban climate resilience scholars and ask them to rate the importance of the sixteen characteristics, to allow for more direct comparison between results presented in this paper and the thinking of leading resilience scholars. It would also be useful to conduct a more representative sample of local practitioners in the U.S. and to survey practitioners in other countries to see how their definitions and characteristic ratings compare. This latter point seems logical since many of the academics whose work we reviewed are not from the U.S. Given the recent explosion in resilience research and policy, it would also be useful to rerun the survey and update the literature review to see whether understandings of resilience have changed in the last couple years. Moving beyond this study, there is a clear need to explore why scholars and practitioners have different conceptualizations of resilience and to empirically examine and test resilience characteristics in different urban contexts to see what types of plans and policies are being implemented at the local level to build more resilient communities, how these activities relate to what is known about fostering resilience, and whether they lead to improved outcomes.