Making sense of resilience

Journal Article (2021)
Author(s)

Jose Carlos Cañizares-Gaztelu (TU Delft - Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

Samantha Marie Copeland (TU Delft - Ethics & Philosophy of Technology, TU Delft - Values Technology and Innovation)

Neelke Doom (TU Delft - Values Technology and Innovation, TU Delft - Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

Research Group
Ethics & Philosophy of Technology
Copyright
© 2021 J.C. Cañizares Gaztelu, S.M. Copeland, N. Doorn
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158538
More Info
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Publication Year
2021
Language
English
Copyright
© 2021 J.C. Cañizares Gaztelu, S.M. Copeland, N. Doorn
Related content
Research Group
Ethics & Philosophy of Technology
Issue number
15
Volume number
13
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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.