a) Definition of Resilience
The term ‘resilience’ is of 17th century origin and was originally used in physics to denote the ability of an object to absorb and then release energy when deformed elastically [
11]. Thus a rubber ball is resilient; subject to a blunt force it will deform and then rebound to its original shape; a crystal ball will shatter in the same circumstances and is thus not resilient. The resilience of a cannon ball is less obvious; however, although it takes a great force to deform it elastically, once this has happened, it does not release the energy and resume its original shape. As such, a cannon ball is not particularly resilient, although it is strong or deformation resistant.
‘Resilience’ seems to have begun use as a metaphor in the 19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes three now obscure metaphorical uses before setting out a fourth that is still used and is the one of interest in this paper [
11]:
“The quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; robustness, adaptability.”
The OED gives four examples of its use ranging from 1857 to 2002; of these, three refer to individuals and one, from 1857, refers to a collective, the Scottish people. This metaphorical use was extended in the 1970s into the arena of ecology [
12,
13]. An early example is the resilience of the seas to oil spills. In various areas of engineering the term has been used to describe products, production systems and computer networks. A computer system with reliable back-up memory is resilient. In the social sciences the term has been used in economics to describe supply chains and organisations [
14], and in psychology, to describe the capacity to resist factors conducive to mental illness; for example, trauma is associated with mental illness but most who suffer trauma come through without such illness [
12,
15‐
24]. Finally, as we have seen, the term has also been applied to communities to mean, roughly, the capacity of a community to rebound from events conducive to community dysfunction or breakdown [
4,
16,
24‐
37].
In all these uses, resilience is the internal quality i) of something ii) to return to a state (such as equilibrium) iii) in the face of external challenge or adversity. In other words, resilience is of something, to something, to some endpoint. Table
1 compares some of the uses.
Table 1
Different uses of the term resilience
Rubber ball | Blunt force | Form previous to blunt force |
Ecosystem | e.g. Oil spill | Previous biodiversity |
Organisation | e.g. Supermarket supply-chain problem | Previous supply of goods to customers |
Individual psychology | e.g. Mugging | Mentally healthy life |
Communities | e.g. Earthquake | Previous state of lifestyle for community members |
Note that the example stressors in the table are acute, short-term shocks to the system. As such, the resilience of the system (such as the ball or the individual person) is marked by its capacity to return to normal: the endpoint, in other words, is as-you-were.
At this point, however, a distinction needs to be made that is, to our knowledge, new to the literature. It is that the as-you-were endpoint is unsatisfactory in relation to chronic problems, extended over time, such as a child growing up in an abusive household [
38,
39], or a community facing long-term poverty and unemployment [
29,
30,
40‐
44]. The desirable endpoint for a child in an abusive household relates to what she becomes, not her starting point; it is not as-you-were but rather as-you-should-be. Roughly, we hope she becomes an adult with reasonable mental health who is able to function in society. It was the recognition that most individuals from apparently deprived backgrounds fared reasonably well as adults that was the origin of the use of the term ‘resilience’ in relation to people and in the asset-based approach to psychology [
45].
This as-you-should-be endpoint requires a value judgement; how the system should be. In the example of the child growing up in an abusive household this seems reasonably straightforward; what she should be (amongst other things) is mentally well. But we would be less willing to judge an individual as resilient if, against the odds, she becomes a wealthy and successful criminal, even though she might judge herself as such. We tend to use other terms to denote the ability of individuals or things to carry on when we’d rather they didn’t. The ability of an individual or community to carry on with high levels of unhealthy behaviour in the face of pressure from public health professionals might be called stubborn rather than resilient, as might the ability of an organisation such as the Mafia to resist the efforts of law enforcement. This is not to say that the term ‘resilience’ is never used pejoratively, just that it is usually not. Table
2 summarises the new terminology introduced thus far.
Table 2
Summary of new terminology
Endpoint
| Something’s resilience is a function of its ability to reach an endpoint having been subject to a stressor (or distorting force) that tends to move it away from that endpoint. |
As-you-were endpoint
| The paradigm endpoint is of an as-you-were type; that is, something’s resilience is the extent to which it can revert to the state it was in before being subject to the stressor (as with a rubber ball subject to a blunt force). |
As-you-should-be endpoint
| However the term ‘resilience’ is sometimes applied in cases where an as-you-were endpoint would not apply. For example, a child growing up in an abusive family would be deemed resilient if he developed into a well-balanced adult, not if he remained an abused child. Here it seems better to talk of an as-you-should-be endpoint. |
Acute and Chronic stressors
| A stressor is acute if its impact is fairly brief: examples include a rubber ball thrown against a wall and a community subject to an earthquake. It is chronic if its impact is long term: examples include a rubber ball stored long term under pressure and a community subject to chronic poverty. |
Note that the judgements above of as-you-should-be resilience are of individuals or organisations. In such cases resilience seems to relate to good functioning; a resilient organisation or individual is able to function well in the face of difficulty. The notion of organisations having a function is straightforward. There is also an extensive philosophical literature on the notion of good human functioning. This has origins in Classical Greece but is still a live topic; the idea is that someone functions well when they live well [
46]. By contrast, the basis in relation to community resilience is not clear because a community has no obvious function against which we can decide whether it is as-it-should-be. How do we decide what a community should be?
b) Definition of communities
To answer this question we need to discuss the notion of community itself. A commonly-used categorisation is between communities of [
47]:
-
Location, such as a neighbourhood;
-
Culture, such as an ethnic group;
-
Purpose, such as a political association.
Some communities will be combinations of these. For example, a Native American rights group living in a reservation combines all three. Indeed, much of the literature relating to resilient communities comes from the USA; in one example, Hispanic populations are noted as resilient to poverty [
48]. However, this coincidence of a community of culture, the Hispanics, with a community of location, the Hispanic quarter, applies more clearly in North American than in European cities. In multi-ethnic cities in the UK, such as London or Birmingham, it is rare to find mono-ethnic neighbourhoods. As such, UK neighbourhoods are likely to share fewer of the ties of culture and purpose seen in US neighbourhoods. Such mono-ethnic neighbourhoods as there are will tend to be of the majority White population, thus lacking any sense of shared difference with wider society and thus of homogeneity within. In such neighbourhoods, people may feel they have little in common with each other and no sense of belonging to the area: they might feel stronger ties to a community within or outside of the neighbourhood based, for example, on ethnicity. This raises a problem for practitioners: when policy makers speak of resilient communities they tend to mean deprived neighbourhoods; but these combine the difficulty of knowing what we mean by resilience (because it is hard to attribute to localities an as-you-should-be endpoint) with a lack of sense of community held by people in the neighbourhood. Can this difficulty be overcome?
In the table above we gave the example of an earthquake as a stressor to a neighbourhood broken down by the three-question framework (of what, to what, to what endpoint?). Let us now extend this to take in three different types of community and two different types of stressor. This is illustrated in Table
3; note that the last two boxes show again the problem of defining endpoints for a resilient community.
Table 3
Community stressors and endpoints
Purpose e.g. political association | A) Database loss | As-you-were1
| (To campaign for) political goals |
C) Ageing membership, loss of leader, internal argument |
Culture e.g. religion, ethnicity | A) Violent assault on religious Centre | As-you-were | Maintenance of religion, language and so on |
C) Young people exposed to dominant antithetical culture |
Location e.g. neighbourhood | A) Earthquake | As-you-were | Previous state of lifestyle for community members |
| C) Poverty, unemployment | ? | ? |
How might the two incomplete boxes be filled? In broad terms it seems reasonable to say that almost all people seek to live well, to flourish, to be happy and so on. And although there are huge differences in people’s picture of what a good life consists in, there are likely to be some common elements, such as having reasonably good health. These common elements are at the heart of the Capability Approach [
49].
The Capability Approach developed from work in the measurement of economic progress. In standard approaches an economy is said to be progressing if its Gross National Product (GNP) increases. There are numerous problems with this: for example, a rising GNP is compatible with rising inequality or with lack of opportunity for groups in society, such as women or minority ethnic groups [
50‐
52]. In contrast, under the Capability Approach what matters in assessing an economy is people’s opportunity for functionings, that is, what they can be and do. The to-be functionings are states such as being well nourished, being in a warm house, and being literate. The to-do functionings are activities such as travelling, voting, having a family life, having a rewarding job; all things we might associate with living well [
52]. The opportunities for functioning are an individual’s capability. They come in sets: for example, an individual with a low-paid job might be able to earn enough to feed her family but at the price of being unable to spend time with the family. Central to the Capability Approach is that if an individual does not have within her set of choices an option in which all important to-do and to-be functionings are available, then her wellbeing is compromised. Most of the to-do and to-be functionings are unavailable to an individual in complete isolation, a Robinson Crusoe character. Human beings are dependent and interdependent social animals who can flourish a) only in communities and b) only in communities that provide a minimum level of social goods or, in other words, an adequate Capability set.
This gives a plausible endpoint for neighbourhoods. It is of the as-you-should-be type and is: to contribute positively to the inhabitants’ wellbeing (or Capability set). A good neighbourhood is one which does; a resilient one has the additional quality of being able to do so in the face of potentially undermining stressors, such as poverty. Table
4 below shows this by completing the gaps left on Table
3.
Table 4
Neighbourhood chronic stressors and endpoint
Location e.g. neighbourhood | C) Poverty, unemployment | As-you-should-be | Provides good environment for human functioning. |