Resilience: From practice to theory and back again

Abstract

This book offers a purposefully broad exploration of resilience: It presents a variety of diverse perspectives in a range of practical contexts across various scales of system from a range of disciplinary positions. One of the core organising principles of this book is a concern with understanding how ideas of resilience can be translated into practice, and how practices of resilience can in turn be theorised and explained—irrespective of whether those practices are conducted at the ‘street-level’ by frontline actors or in the committee rooms of policymakers. To do this, the book explores empirical, methodological and theoretical challenges in analysing resilience, defining resilience, organising resilience, building resilience, leading resilience and regulating resilience—to name just a few of the activities that provide the focus of concern in these chapters. In this chapter, we provide a brief and necessarily partial survey of the varieties and commonalities of resilience that have emerged throughout the book, and then explore how—and why—we might move towards an integrated theoretical framework of resilience.