How do we study resilience? New paper

Our new study, years in the making, is finally out! The study, in which Yann, Marie-Claude and Olivia were involved, is an outcome of the project "Socio-ecological resilience in the face of global environmental change in heterogeneous landscapes – building a common platform for understanding and action", headed by Sandra Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), in which we participated in 2019-2022.

The paper explores the use of the concept of resilience, which has gone from a relatively obscure idea to somewhat of a household item over the last couple of decades. We argue that the idea’s appeal lies in part in the fact that it is intuitive and cuts across disciplines, much like that of sustainability, for example. Yet, when the time comes of applying it to real-life contexts, not all studies use the concept of resilience rigorously. We wanted to know how empirical studies, not just conceptual or modeling work, were tackling resilience. In particular, we were curious to see how many of these studies met what we called basic operationalization criteria – criteria that indicate a minimum level of rigor and comparability in these studies –, namely, defining a system of interest, specifying disturbances, providing a definition of resilience, evaluating resilience (either qualitatively or quantitatively), and for studies that examine social-ecological systems, integrating social and ecological dimensions in that evaluation.

We found thousands of academic papers that used the word in the last couple of decades but focused on 463 that were empirical and meaningfully engaged with the concept of resilience. Among these, we found that over half (51%) failed to meet at least one of these operationalization criteria, and that among studies of social-ecological systems, a majority (54%) did not integrate social and ecological dimensions in their evaluation of resilience. Even those articles that met our criteria often did so just barely, staying relatively vague for example in their definition of the system of interest or in how social and ecological dimensions were related. To indicate a way forward, we looked at good examples in our database and suggested some “best practices” for future empirical studies of resilience.

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