Resilience resistance: The challenges and implications of urban resilience implementation

Abstract

Growing concern about major threats, including climate change, environmental disasters, and other hazards, is matched with the increased interest and appeal of the concept of urban resilience. Much scholarly attention has focused on how to define urban resilience, in addition to raising questions about its applicability and usefulness. But those debates typically overlook questions of implementation. Implementation is important not only for how cities respond to threats but also because it can influence how urban resilience is perceived, discussed, and understood. The policy literature suggests that implementation is rarely straightforward and has ideological and normative perspectives embedded within it. Building on this literature, this paper argues that urban resilience implementation raises its own conceptual questions for both theory and practice. Further, implementing urban resilience entails its own unique challenges, such as extensive coordination, maintaining adaptability, divergent time horizons, and diverse outcomes. The paper also introduces the idea of resilience resistance as a new challenge for urban resilience. Resistance refers to the condition in which governance systems inherently develop barriers to change, flexibility, and adaptability through implementation. Several aspects of resistance are highlighted, including fatigue, complacency, and overconfidence. However, the implementation process can also have unintended positive effects on a city's capacity to prepare for and respond to shocks.

What determines city’s resilience against epidemic outbreak: evidence from China’s COVID-19 experience

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Conceptualizing Urban Economic Resilience at the Time of Covid-19 and Beyond

“…call resilience "an all-encompassing metaphor" metaphor which can be applied in a variety of national and international contexts. It also takes a position that ultimately only practice is the criterion of truth and the experience of implementing urban resilience policies and programs will "shape and influence our understanding of how the term urban resilience can and should be conceived" (Shamsuddin 2020). From a practitioner's point of view, a fine definition of urban resilience is less important than its potential to guide the activities of local economic actors to adopt and adapt approaches to urban resilience that fit their individual and local needs, capacity, and historical experience.…”

Managing Climate Change: The Role of Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships in Building Climate Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa

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