(Un)Defining resilience: subjective understandings of ‘resilience’ from the field

Abstract

This introduction addresses the rise of ‘resilience thinking’ in development practice and argues that though scholars and practitioners have sought to define and measure the term resilience the concept is neither fixed nor self-evident. We argue that this lack of ontological coherence unexpectedly makes resilience more productive as an object of inquiry than it would be if it were reduced to a standardised analytical framework or technical object. In the article, we draw on our experiences with a multi-caseparticipatory, community-based research project oriented at uncovering subjective understandings of resilience. These different cases are featured in the articles in this special issue; in the introduction we bring them together to argue that paying attention to the grounded and embedded processes of meaning-making around resilience reveals not only the ambiguity and place-specificity of the concept but also exposes the contradictions inherent in many resilience-oriented interventions.