Renaissance of Resilience: A Buzzword or a New Ideal?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented public health crisis in the 21 st century, demonstrates how risks are unequally distributed among different socioeconomic groups, how bureaucratic systems can be ineffectively adapting to the fast-paced changing dynamics, and how multi-level governance frameworks may lack coordination between national and regional sectors. The pandemic does not cause the unjust prerogatives to quarantine, testing kits, and even potential vaccines. The injustice, ineffectiveness, and a lack of coordination existed before the pandemic and are more noticeably presented by this public health disaster. No hazards are 'natural'. The coronavirus may originate from nature, but the adverse effects are mostly generated and magnified by current socioeconomic orders. The elderly (Armitage & Nellums, 2020), gender-based violence victims (Chandan et al., 2020), people living with disabilities (Pereira-Sanchez et al., 2020), immigrants (Keller & Wagner, 2020), and children in poverty (Lancker & Parolin, 2020) are more exposed to the increased morbidity and mortality. Globally, low-income and middle-income countries are at higher risks of the pandemic's negative effects, worsening existing structural inequalities, such as food security (Health, 2020; Hopman, Allegranzi, & Mehtar, 2020; Kelley et al., 2020). Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when uncertainty becomes the new normal, the notion of resilience has frequently been mentioned among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from various fields, including public health, urban planning, emergency management, and economics. Is such renaissance of resilience useful in the face of the pandemic? ANOTHER BUZZWORD OR THE NEW INSIGHT? In the past few decades, there have been incoherent definitions, interpretations, and analytical models proposed to understand, apply, and assess the notion of resilience and its related concepts (

What Is the Role of Resilience and Coping Strategies on the Mental Health of the General Population during the COVID-19 Pandemic? Results from the Italian Multicentric COMET Study

“…People using positive coping strategies, such as planning, acceptance and reframing, have higher levels of resilience. This is in line with a study carried out on health care professionals, which showed that having positive attitudes in the workplace is associated with low levels of distress [57], greater psychological wellbeing, and better quality of life [81,82].…”

Airline effective operations strategy during COVID-19 pandemic: across regional worldwide survey

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent crisis exposing several organizational disadvantages, and testing their governance mechanism. In this pandemic, when uncertainty becomes the norm, researchers, decision makers and policymakers from various fields have widely used the notion of resilience (Cai, 2020). The word “resilience” is derived from the Latin resilire , which means to jump back or recoil, and the concept of resilience has been adopted by many disciplines, such as engineering, biology, psychology and ecology (Giustiniano et al , 2020).…”

“…The outbreak of COVID-19 soon put the airlines in a very critical situation. Since the start of lockdowns as a consequence of the pandemic, many scholars and practitioners have focused on discussing and recommending the principles of organizational resilience (Cai, 2020). The core of the concept and practice of the resilient organization is that organizations should cope with crises effectively through proactive plans and the ability to bounce back smoothly in recovery (Giustiniano et al, 2018).…”

The Resilience Forum: A Lingering Conclusion

“…Emergency management systems become sorely tested (Cai & Ye, 2020). Do we have a new buzzword for uncertain times (Cai, 2020) or something to learn from that will help in coping with future crises or understanding the renaissance of resilience? Some themes rise above others.…”