Resilience and Complexity: A Bibliometric Review and Prospects for Industrial Ecology

Abstract

Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in academic research and public discourse and is closely connected to complex systems theory. This article reviews research on resilience and complexity in industrial ecology and the broader academy by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the academic literature over a 40-year period (1973-2014). The review revealed a large body of scholarship composed of five clearly identifiable intellectual communities, with resilience theory from ecology especially influential. Based on the study of ecosystems, these scholars conceptualize resilience as a dynamic and adaptive property of systems with multiple stable states that evolve over time. In comparison, resilience research in industrial ecology is limited and underdeveloped. Bibliometric analysis of this literature yielded just 37 publications and a scholarly network with no well-formulated research communities. This contrasts with industrial ecology scholarship on sustainability; a similar search yielded 1,581 publications. Given the emerging importance of the resilience concept and its relevance for sustainability issues, industrial ecology should expand research efforts in this area. The growing body of industrial ecology scholarship on complex systems provides a foundation to do so, as does the field's long-standing practice of using ecological principles to inform the study and design of industrial ecosystems. The article concludes by discussing how industrial ecology would benefit from incorporating principles of dynamic resilience and, conversely, how industrial ecology approaches could advance broader resilience scholarship.

Resilience (Republished)

“…Resilience work expanded from adaptively managing ecosystems (e.g., Pritchard 2002, Curtin andParker 2014) to adaptively governing complex social-ecological systems (e.g., Folke et al 2005, Armitage et al 2007, bringing in the role of institutions, organizations, networks, and agency in this context (e.g., Adger 2000, Dietz et al 2003, Olsson et al 2004, Galaz 2005, Tompkins 2005, Crona and Bodin 2006, Westley et al 2006, Berkes 2009, Bodin and Crona 2009, social learning elements and knowledge systems (e.g., Berkes et al 2000, Olsson and Folke 2001, Chapin et al 2006, Fazey et al 2007, Pahl-Wostl 2007, Forbes et al 2009), ancient cultures (e.g., Redman andKinzig 2003, Hegmon et al 2008), and political and power dimensions of sustainability (e.g., Adger et al 2005a, Gelcich et al 2006, Michon 2011). Now, the resilience concept has spread and this is not the place to review the large and expanding literature (e.g., Brand and Jax 2007, Janssen 2007, Brown and Westaway 2011, Xu and Marinova 2013, Baggio et al 2015, Desjardins et al 2015, Meerow and Newell 2015, Pu and Qiu 2016, close to an impossible task. But resilience is influencing the environmental sciences from agriculture to oceans as well as global environmental and climate change reflected in, e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (e.g., O'Brien et al 2012) and in risk and disaster management (e.g., Berkes 2007<...>…”

Comparing Conceptualizations of Urban Climate Resilience in Theory and Practice

“…The academic literature makes a major distinction between "engineering resilience", which is about resisting change and returning to a prior state of equilibrium following a disturbance, and "ecological resilience", which focuses on maintaining key functions while accepting that it is not always possible or desirable to return to previous conditions [25,26]. This division is also framed as "bouncing back" versus "bouncing forward" [27].…”

International progress and evaluation on interactive coupling effects between urbanization and the eco-environment

“…The research covers a number of disciplines, including ecology, geography, management, economics and environmental studies (Kennedy et al, 2011;Satterthwaite, 2008;Salim and Shafiei, 2014;Scholz and Binder, 2011). Case studies have been conducted on a variety of countries and regions, including Europe, the US, Russia and China (Barbera et al, 2010;Alnawaiseh et al, 2015;Zanella et al, 2014;Bao and Fang, 2007), with a tendency to look at watersheds, ecologically vulnerable areas, urbanized areas and metropolitan areas (Fang, 2015a;Zawar-Reza et al, 2010;Meerow and Newell, 2015). Studies have taken as their scope the world, countries, provinces, cities and parts of cities, with the main focus being cities (Luo et al, 2009;Yang et al, 2015;Anderson and O'farrell, 2012;Brown, 2012).…”