Print Email Facebook Twitter Making sense of resilience Title Making sense of resilience Author Cañizares Gaztelu, J.C. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology) Copeland, S.M. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology; TU Delft Values Technology and Innovation) Doorn, N. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology; TU Delft Values Technology and Innovation) Department Values Technology and Innovation Date 2021 Abstract While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related do-mains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlap-ping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for re-forming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosys-tem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clar-ifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience. Subject AntifragilityEcosystem scienceEfficiencyEnvironmental managementLock-insNormativityResilienceRobustnessSustainability To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:55e7a8b0-a296-4758-985c-0713e661e617 DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158538 ISSN 2071-1050 Source Sustainability, 13 (15) Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2021 J.C. Cañizares Gaztelu, S.M. Copeland, N. Doorn Files PDF sustainability_13_08538_v2.pdf 430.16 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:55e7a8b0-a296-4758-985c-0713e661e617/datastream/OBJ/view