Knowledge Structures and Components of Rural Resilience in the 2010s: Conceptual Development and Implications

Abstract

Resilience is being widely adopted as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding sustainability dynamics, despite the conceptual challenges in developing proxies and indicators for researchers and policy makers. In our study, we observed how the concept of resilience undergoes continued extension within the rural resilience literature. We comprehensively reviewed rural resilience literature using keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) analysis and a systematic review of shortlisted papers. We conducted the KCN analysis for 1186 papers to characterize the state of the rural resilience literature, and systematically reviewed 36 shortlisted papers to further examine how rural resilience analysis and its assessment tools are helping understand the complexity and interdependence of rural social-ecological systems, over three three-year periods from 2010 to 2018. The results show that the knowledge structure built by the high frequency of co-occurrence keywords remains similar over the three-year periods, including climate change, resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, and management, whereas the components of knowledge have greatly expanded, indicating an increased understanding of rural system dynamics. Through the systematic review, we found that developing resilience assessment tools is often designed as a process to strengthen adaptive capacity at the household or community level in response to global processes of climate change and economic globalization. Furthermore, community resilience is found to be an interesting knowledge component that has characterized rural resilience literature in the 2010s. Based on our study, we summarized conceptual characteristics of rural resilience and discussed the challenges and implications for researchers and policy makers.

Rural sustainability methods, drivers, and outcomes: A systematic review

“…Similar to reviews of the literature on rural development (Evans et al, 2015; Lu & de Vries, 2021) and rural resilience (Kim et al, 2020), we find the number of empirical studies on rural sustainability has grown substantially over the past three decades. This trend also reflects increased awareness about global sustainability issues and interest in quantifying, tracking, and comparing sustainability progress (Mura et al, 2018; Yang et al, 2021).…”

“…Studies examining how interventions such as policies or government supported programs impact rural sustainability (as opposed to examining how underlying contextual factors drive changes in rural sustainability) are particularly likely to operationalize rural sustainability in terms of the Triple Bottom Line, pointing to their importance for management and decision‐making (Asche et al, 2018; Correia, 2019; Elkington, 1998; Kates et al, 2005; Matson et al, 2016). These findings suggest researchers are actively addressing the challenge of accounting for the complexity and tradeoffs inherent in sustainability issues (Kim et al, 2020). However, our findings suggest some aspects of rural sustainability are understudied.…”

“…While they find engagement with sustainability within the rural development literature has increased over the past few decades and that most sustainability interventions involve some form of community engagement, they do not provide a synthesis of how rural sustainability is operationalized, or how rural sustainability is related to the driving forces examined. More recently, Kim et al (2020) conduct a keyword co‐occurrence network analysis of the literature on rural resilience and review papers on the application of rural resilience assessments. Their study is more heavily focused on assessments related to climate change and natural disasters than the human interventions and drivers that we find are the predominate consideration of studies framed in terms of rural sustainability.…”

“…Their study is more heavily focused on assessments related to climate change and natural disasters than the human interventions and drivers that we find are the predominate consideration of studies framed in terms of rural sustainability. In addition, Kim et al (2020) list some of the variables used in rural resilience assessments yet do not specifically distinguish between the factors used to operationalize rural resilience and the variables examined as driving factors or the relationships between the two.…”

A Review of Village Ecosystem Vulnerability and Resilience: Implications for the Rocky Desertification Control

“…Recent scientific research shows that an increasing number of studies use resilience to analyze the sustainability dynamics of villages. The interdisciplinary analysis of villages covers various aspects such as human ecology, ecological economics, rural sociology and environmental studies, and discusses the internal and external factors that influence the sustainability dynamics of the village [ 76 ]. The current research on village resilience mainly focuses on resilience evaluation and resilience enhancement strategies.…”