Geographies of resilience: challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept

In disaster science, policy and practice, the transition of resilience from a descriptive concept to a normative agenda provides challenges and opportunities.

This paper argues that both are needed to increase resilience. It briefly outlines the concept and several recent international resilience-building efforts to elucidate critical questions and less-discussed issues. The paper highlights the need to move resilience thinking forward by emphasizing structural social-political processes, acknowledging and acting on differences between ecosystems and societies, and looking beyond the quantitative streamlining of resilience into one index.

Instead of imposing a technical-reductionist framework, it suggests a starting basis of integrating different knowledge types and experiences to generate scientifically reliable, context-appropriate and socially robust resilience-building activities.