The concept of social or community resilience has gained in popularity over the last two decades. In the field of sustainability, the term often refers to the ability or process of a community in preparing for, responding to, and transforming due to socio-ecological disruptions. Understanding how communities can successfully respond and adapt to major and often rapid changes in environmental, social, economic or political realms is important for shaping planning, programs and policies aimed to improve such responses. However, the resilience concept is also ambiguous due to contributions from fields as diverse as psychology, urban planning and ecology, due to disagreements in how to measure social resilience, and due to critiques about the lack of discussion related to equity, power and social dynamics. Further, much of the literature around resilience has been theoretical, with limited empirical studies of real-time community resilience (or lack thereof).
This Topical Collection seeks to address these gaps in the social resilience literature by, for example, synthesizing theories from multiple disciplines, integrating issues of equity and power into existing resilience frameworks, and, perhaps most importantly, applying social resilience theories to context-specific examples of resilience-in-action.
The keywords are:
Social Resilience; Community Resilience;Sustainability; Adapation; Equity; Case Study.