Understanding resilience through the lens of change

Abstract

Building resilience requires a good strategy for managing change across disciplines as well as scales of community. The chief difficulty is that it can be difficult to recognize the nature of change even when processes are ongoing and easy to observe. Inertia and the bias of previous knowledge can cloud perspective, while a lack of communication and even awareness of issues between local communities and government or other groups, hinders the process. Change is a powerful motivator for planning resilience. The complexity that usually comes with it suggests we need to build in enough flexibility to manage the unknown as it comes up rather than try to plan for all events in advance. That is not to say that preparation is not useful. To the contrary, it is important to become as best informed as possible of risks and vulnerabilities, as well as to share knowledge about best practices and lessons learned from experience at every level of practice. In that regard, learning is an important part of the process. Building on the body of texts collected in this book the authors propose two key insights: 1. In the case of resilience, learning is best undertaken as a reflexive practice, meaning that knowledge should be constantly tested by practice and critical questioning. 2. Building an approach to resilience that incorporates all scales is essential in order to manage complex problems. Future research will aim to test these insights by finding case studies that show how communities modified their response as they responded in a crisis. Using that information an evidence based process can be developed for policy makers and leaders in order to prepare communities to act more effectively and be more resilient in the face of change.