Making sense of resilience

Abstract

While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related do-mains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlap-ping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for re-forming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosys-tem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clar-ifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience.