Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object
1,268 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article reviews the variety of definitions proposed for "resilience" within sustainability science and suggests a typology according to the specific degree of normativity. There is a tension between the original descriptive concept of resilience first defined in ecological science and a more recent, vague, and malleable notion of resilience used as an approach or boundary object by different scientific disciplines. Even though increased conceptual vagueness can be valuable to foster communication across disciplines and between science and practice, both conceptual clarity and practical relevance of the concept of resilience are critically in danger. The fundamental question is what conceptual structure we want resilience to have. This article argues that a clearly specified, descriptive concept of resilience is critical in providing a counterbalance to the use of resilience as a vague boundary object. A clear descriptive concept provides the basis for operationalization and application of resilience within ecological science.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d3ed7dd0cd9005f735a84798d180140c0e80eec
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Rethinking the Galapagos Islands as a Complex Social-Ecological System: Implications for Conservation and Management (2008, background): “Despite some debate regarding the value of resilience as a descriptive concept or as a boundary object with a broad, vague meaning (Brand and Jax 2007), resilience theory (http://www.resalliance.org ) has been successful in a number of cases as a way of understanding the dynamics and the complexity…”
- A Theory on Urban Resilience to Floods—A Basis for Alternative Planning Practices (2012, background): “With growing popularity, the term resilience is increasingly used vaguely such that it is becoming like the word sustainability, i.e., having a diluted and unclear meaning (Brand and Jax 2007).”
- An indicator framework for assessing livelihood resilience in the context of social–ecological dynamics (2014, background): “Brand and Jax (2007) examined definitions of resilience based on their degree of normativity, showing that resilience can be a descriptive concept, a normative concept or a hybrid of both.”
- Advances in restoration ecology: rising to the challenges of the coming decades (2015, background): “However, it is fair to say that the concept of resilience remains difficult to quantify especially in a restoration context (Brand and Jax 2007, Standish et al. 2014).”
- Capturing the cornerstones of coral reef resilience: linking theory to practice (2008, background): “However, practical advancements of how to operationalize resilience theory have lagged behind (Brand and Jax 2007) and there is a clear lack of early warning signals of massive change (Scheffer et al. 2001).”
- Critical natural capital revisited: Ecological resilience and sustainable development (2009, methodology): “Modified from Scheffer and Carpenter (2003) and Brand and Jax (2007) .”
- A 40-year review of food–energy–water nexus literature and its application to the urban scale (2019, background): “Useful devices to leverage respective disciplinary expertise (Newell andCousins 2015), boundary objects are malleable concepts that enable communication across disciplines through use of shared terminology, even though how a term may be conceptualized will vary by discipline (Brand and Jax 2007).”
- The Handbook of Neoliberalism (2016, neutral): “, Brand and Jax 2007; Downes et al. 2013; Manyena 2006; Norris et al. 2008) invariably differ in terms of coherence, conciseness, and precision. However, the most striking variance may be observed in the philosophical predisposition to resilience. Positivism reigns supreme in physical and natural sc”