From Alec Terrana and Wael Al-Delaimy’s paper “A systematic review of cross-cultural measures of resilience and its promotive and protective factors” (2023):
Resilience as a theoretical construct
Since its early appearances in mental health literature in the 1970s, the concept of resilience has undergone a dramatic evolution. Although initially conceptualized as an individual's ability to successfully adapt and “bounce back” from adverse circumstances as determined by the interaction of various risks and protective factors, achieving a commonly agreed upon definition has remained elusive (Windle et al., 2011). Despite these difficulties, however, it is important to strive for a high degree of terminological and methodological sophistication for this research to be most useful (Southwick et al., 2014). As such, researchers have valuably pointed out that, despite the diversity of definitions, there is agreement that resilience entails (a) positive adaptation and good mental health, despite (b) exposure to significant adversity or threat (Luthar et al., 2000).
The changing grounds of resilience research have seen a shift away from a strict weighing of risks and protective factors in favor of recognizing resilience as a dynamic process of positively adapting to acute or sustained adverse circumstances (McCranie et al., 2011; Southwick et al., 2014). This contemporary view on positive adaptation further differentiates between promotive and protective factors. Although commonly referenced together as promotive and protective factors and processes (PPFP), promotive factors refer specifically to predictors of higher levels of positive outcomes, whereas protective factors denote predictors of lower levels of psychological symptoms (Patel & Goodman, 2007). Although these factors are intermingling and often co-occurring, promotive and protective factors are not strictly the inverse of each other and the absence of a psychological disorder should not be considered synonymous with positive well-being. Furthermore, these predictors have been shown to vary with context, timing, and the resilient outcome of interest, with some evidence even suggesting that what may be promotive in one context, might be protective in another, as was found when comparing the role of political affiliation among Nepali former child soldiers and Bosnian adolescents (Jones, 2002; Kohrt et al., 2010; Tol, Jordans, et al., 2013).
This emphasis on context captures what is perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary perspectives on resilience: its ecological dimensions, which allows researchers to more effectively achieve cultural relevance in their assessments of the construct (Panter-Brick, 2015). The ecological view situates the individual within their environment, positioning resilience as the interaction of numerous levels of analysis, from the genetic, epigenetic, and developmental, up to the demographic, cultural, economic, and social (Southwick et al., 2014).
This shift has greatly benefited from the framework outlined by Brofenbrenner (1979) in his model of child development, which maps out ecological context as a series of related yet distinct micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems, at the center of which sits the individual. The individual's most immediate contextual level is his or her microsystem, which addresses the interaction between the individual and the immediate environment, such as the home or school. The mesosystem then considers interactions between multiple microsystems, such as the interplay between an individual's supports at home and their school supports. Broader societal structures such as the political and economic systems within which these mesosystems interact are addressed by the concept of the exosystem, all of which is encompassed within the broader macrosystem that includes the overall cultural context and its concomitant customs and ideologies (Betancourt & Khan, 2008).
This macrosystem is distinct from “community resilience,” which is most often used to refer to the broader capacity of systems to adapt in response to shocks or stresses, as opposed to the impact of the cultural milieu on individuals (Bhandari & Alonge, 2020). Although components of community resilience, which range from “participation of women in community decision making” to “water security and management”, are likely to inform the various levels of Brofenbrenner's ecology, they ultimately require separate consideration (Clark-Ginsberg et al., 2020).
The ecological framework and its emphasis on culture highlights the importance of interpreting resilience through the lens of anthropology, which situates individuals within their broader context and stresses the capacity of both the individual and their environment to buffer against the effects of adversity (Ungar, 2013). Although individual traits, beliefs, and capacities play an important role in resilience, the cultural, social, economic, and political systems in which they are enmeshed also have a moderating effect on the likelihood of the individual to experience resilience (Leadbeater et al., 2005).
From David Chandler’s “Resilience and the end(s) of the politics of adaptation” (2019):
Resilience approaches discursively frame policy problems, and their resolution, through the focus on enabling and capacity-building communities and systems – held to be ‘vulnerable’, ‘at risk’ or ‘failing’ – through an imaginary that somehow natural, innate or inherent resources and productive capacities can be enhanced and developed. These potential imaginaries of resilience – as a policy-making ‘magic bullet’ for problems as diverse as underdevelopment, conflict and environmental crises – have come under challenge today. The argument of this conclusion is that approaches attuned to the centrality of the Anthropocene provide a critique of the politics of adaptation which is much more powerful than that levelled by critical societal and political theorists who have, over the last decade, condemned resilience discourses for their imbrications within neoliberal paradigms (Chandler, 2014; Evans & Reid, 2014; Joseph, 2013; Walker &
Cooper, 2011). In fact, the problematic of global warming and climate change appears to directly challenge the assumptions about resilience, neoliberalism and complexity developed by Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper (2011) in their article that initiated the mainstreaming of critical thinking in this area. Walker and Cooper argued that resilience-thinking was immune to critique, ‘reabsorbing’ or ‘metabolizing critique into its internal dynamic’ as ‘the complex adaptive system remains self-referential even when it encounters the most violent of shocks’ (2011, p. 157). As long as policy-makers and academic theorists presumed a modernist ‘one world world’ external to us and amenable to governing and policy interventions, resilience thinking could ‘reabsorb’ or ‘metabolize’ shocks and ‘bounce-back’ through learning from disasters – even reimagining catastrophes as ‘emancipatory’ (Beck, 2015) – or as facilitating new forms of self-growth and improved systems of self-management, ‘bouncing-forward’ with what the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, describes as the ‘resilience dividend’ (Rodin, 2015).
The problem is, as Anthropocene thinkers argue, that it is increasingly realised that climate change is not just another problem or crisis to be ‘solved’ or ‘bounced-back’ from’ or ‘recouped’ but rather a sign that modernity itself held out a false promise of salvation, one that has brought us to the brink of destruction (Latour, 2013; Stengers, 2015; Tsing, 2015). While resilience-thinking has recently achieved nearly universal success in the policy-making world – suggesting new sensitivities to problems and rejecting ‘high-modernist’ technocratic approaches, which depended upon universal ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions from on high – resilience is still a ‘modern’ construction which assumes that problems are ‘external’ and that we need to develop ‘internal’ policy solutions to maintain and to enable our existing modes of being in the face of shocks and perturbations. ‘We’ need to be more responsive and adaptable. ‘We’ need to be sensitive to minor changes and to ‘tipping points’ (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2014). In short, that ‘we’ are not the problem, but that ‘we’ need to develop new approaches to preserve our modernist imaginaries of development and progress.
While resilience-thinking could ‘reabsorb’ or ‘metabolize’ critiques framed through modernist assumptions of overcoming and problem-solving, it is unable to ‘adapt’ to the new and increasingly prevalent subjectivities, sensitivities and imaginaries generated by catastrophic climate change. The problems, which the Anthropocene posits for resilience advocacy, have been little recognised in contemporary academic discussions in the humanities and social sciences. Resilience can appear to be still alive and well – if not actually thriving – in policy debates centred upon global warming and climate change.
In fact, for the Stockholm Resilience Alliance – in the view of many commentators, the leading research and advisory body for resilience-thinking – the conceptualisations of resilience and of the Anthropocene are closely interconnected. Particularly in the language of systems ecology, both concepts appear to share understandings of complex adaptive systems, ‘tipping points’ and ‘phase transitions’ and to be sensitive to the limits of ‘top-down’ or ‘linear’ approaches to problem-solving. A glance at the Resilience Alliance webpages reveals the clear interconnections between leading natural and social scientists, whose shared work in systems theory and adaptive systems has shaped thinking in both these areas: including Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, Frank Biermann, Carl Folke, Johan Rockström and Jan Zalasiewicz among others (see also Biermann et al., 2012; Steffen et al., 2011)…
Resilience, as the politics of adaptation, has been heavily problematized in today’s context of global warming and climate change. While modernist and cybernetic approaches to resilience pay attention to systemic interaction, feedback effects and to tipping points they are inevitably productionist, consumptionist and extractivist. They are always focused upon saving or on prolonging or making more efficient what already exists. In the Anthropocene, these approaches stand accused of refusing to see that these contemporary forms of governing life are exactly the problem themselves. It is certainly true that resilience discourses of adaptation are losing purchase because they are too interested in conservation and sustainability rather than transformation, however whether more agential or futural alternatives can emerge or can hold out any opportunities for a different politics is an open one.
From “The Dark Side of Resilience” (2017) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Derek Lusk
Resilience, defined as the psychological capacity to adapt to stressful circumstances and to bounce back from adverse events, is a highly sought-after personality trait in the modern workplace. As Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant argue in their recent book, we can think of resilience as a sort of muscle that contracts during good times and expands during bad times.
In that sense, the best way to develop resilience is through hardship, which various philosophers have pointed out through the years: Seneca noted that “difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body” and Nietzsche famously stated “that which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” In a similar vein, the United States Marine Corps uses the “pain is just weakness leaving the body” mantra as part of their hardcore training program.
But could too much resilience be a bad thing, just like too much muscle mass can be a bad thing — i.e., putting a strain on the heart? Large-scale scientific studies suggest that even adaptive competencies become maladaptive if taken to the extreme. As Rob Kaiser’s research on leadership versatility indicates, overused strengths become weaknesses. In line, it is easy to conceive of situations in which individuals could be too resilient for their own sake.
For example, extreme resilience could drive people to become overly persistent with unattainable goals. Although we tend to celebrate individuals who aim high or dream big, it is usually more effective to adjust one’s goals to more achievable levels, which means giving up on others. Indeed, scientific reviews show that most people waste an enormous amount of time persisting with unrealistic goals, a phenomenon called the “false hope syndrome.” Even when past behaviors clearly suggest that goals are unlikely to be attained, overconfidence and an unfounded degree of optimism can lead to people wasting energy on pointless tasks.
See also this conversation with Stephanie Wakefield, an urban geographer specializing in critical infrastructure studies, urban resilience and adaptation, and social-ecological systems thinking and design here: Experiments in Reslience Amid the Back Loop