Disaster-Related Resilience as Ability and Process: A Concept Guiding the Analysis of Response Behavior before, during and after Extreme Events

Abstract

Extreme weather and climate events research needs concepts to analytically capture processes that describe how extreme they are: depth of impact but mainly also temporal aspects such as length, speed and quality of recovery. This paper analyses resilience as a concept to provide these dimensions. The use of the term resilience proliferates in many contexts and disciplines. Interpretations may overlap or even contradict each other. This paper seeks to make a case for a more nuanced understanding of resilience, including the use of "qualifier adjectives" to emphasize differences. Starting from the original etymological meaning of resilience as "bouncing back" the paper aims an innovative (re)conceptualization to facilitate the practical use of resilience in disaster risk management. It is recommended to distinguish between resilience as ability, being a hazard independent pre-disposition for recovery, and resilience as a process, describing different bouncing back and bouncing forward mechanisms inherent in the different recovery phases. This proposed distinction would enable the assessment of recovery abilities before calamities occur and hence could serve as guide to disaster preparedness programmes. The suggested analysis of resilience as a process would open opportunities to use the concept describing preemptive resilience response (presilience), recovery as bouncing back towards a state preceding the hazard event, as well as progressive resilience (prosilience) as bouncing forward and transition of the disaster recovery phase into adaptation and further development.

Critical infrastructure and flood resilience: Cascading effects beyond water

“…This focus or even, paradigm shift, can be pronounced by underlining or adding the term resilience to FRM, since resilience sets the focus not just on hazard or impact, but on functionality, recovery and dynamic development. While it is possible to simply replacing risk with resilience, we rather argue to keep both risk and resilience, since they retain their specific foci and strengths (Bogardi & Fekete, ). Criticality is another methodological extension of the existing risk algorithms or conceptual elements, as it pronounces identification of a relative importance, hence, setting thresholds and priorities.…”

“…Resilience can be incorporated into the traditional time line model as both an umbrella term and as the designated counterpart to vulnerability. This allows a rather descriptive analysis of resilience in all phases of the disaster and also allows it to be specifically designated into a recovery phase for modeling and more quantitative analyses (Bogardi & Fekete, ). There is a strong critique on a “bouncing back” understanding from the social sciences, which argue that certain social groups would not favor returning to the same (often dire when marginalized or poor) situation (Manyena, O'Brien, O'Keefe, & Rose, ).…”

“…However, after working with the 4R components for some years, we have also experienced certain problems in separating some of the components, such as robustness, from other pre‐existing concepts such as damage or vulnerability. We therefore suggest the following conceptual separation of terminology in Table , building up on previous conceptual work and documentation (Bogardi & Fekete, ).…”

“…Aspects of resilience in the understanding of resilience covering all aspects of abilities and capacities to manage floods (Bogardi & Fekete, ) also cover the flood protection phase (Table ). While protection is mostly about avoidance and prevention from the flood entering certain areas, it also bears some aspects of creating a flood culture and awareness and requires flood control and management (UN/ECE, ).…”

Editorial

“…This very broad definition allows much room for operationalization when applied to a specific spatial implementation. Therefore, in various disciplines questions are discussed such as whether resilience is complementary to or part of flood risk management, how it fits in the disaster cycle, how it can be measured (Jüpner et al, 2018), what are the appropriate system boundaries and how to determine the state of the system (Bogardi & Fekete, 2018;Carpenter, Walker, Anderies, & Abel, 2001;Folke, 2006;Liao, 2012). Some even suggest that resilience is a boundary object (Baggio, Brown, & Hellebrandt, 2015), in other words, a concept that can promote interdisciplinary discussions, in particular through the fuzzy definition (Brand, 2007;Gunder & Hillier, 2009).…”