The Applicability of the Concept of Resilience to Social Systems: Some Sources of Optimism and Nagging Doubts

TLDR

The current sustainability paradigm is limited for understanding and planning around global environmental crises, and while resilience theory offers insight, it is not yet readily applicable to social systems. The article investigates how resilience can be applied to social systems and argues that further theoretical work on system complexity and agency is needed. It provides an overview and critique of recent academic treatments of resilience and proposes guideposts for future research.

Abstract

This article presents an inquiry into prospects for application of the conceptual lens of resilience to social systems. The dominant paradigm of sustainability in its current form is likely to be of limited utility for aiding scholars to contribute to our understanding of past and current global environmental crises, and for planning for such events in the future. Resilience theory offers a compelling source of theoretical insight; however, the current iteration of this framework is not readily applicable to social systems. Our ability to do so requires further theoretical development in the areas of system complexity and agency. This article offers an initial step in this direction, by providing an overview and critique of recent academic treatments of the concept of resilience, and a set of guideposts for further research.