resilience

Resilience comes from the Latin verb resilire, ‘to leap back,’ and for most of its history in English the word described a physical action. Seventeenth-century writers used it for the rebound of a ball or the recoil of a sound. Nineteenth-century engineers gave it a precise meaning: the capacity of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and to release that energy when the load is removed. Engineering textbooks still define the modulus of resilience as the maximum energy a material can store per unit volume without permanent deformation. A steel spring is resilient in this sense; a lump of clay is not.

In 1973 the Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling carried the word into ecology with his paper ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.’ Holling separated two ideas that had often been blurred. Stability, he argued, is how quickly a system returns to equilibrium after a disturbance. Resilience is how much disturbance a system can absorb before it changes into a different state altogether, as when a clear lake turns murky with algae or a coral reef becomes dominated by seaweed. The idea shaped later work on fisheries, forests, climate and the design of infrastructure.

Psychology adopted the term at roughly the same time. Researchers such as Norman Garmezy and Michael Rutter asked why some children exposed to poverty, illness or family breakdown developed well while others did not. The best-known study began on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith followed a group of children born in 1955 for four decades. Roughly one-third of those classified as high-risk grew into competent, caring adults. Common protective factors included a close bond with at least one supportive adult, problem-solving skills and ties to a community such as a school or church. The psychologist Ann Masten summed up the findings in 2001 with the phrase ‘ordinary magic’: resilience usually arises from everyday human resources rather than rare personal qualities.

Governments and aid agencies turned the word into a policy goal. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 168 countries adopted the Hyogo Framework for Action in 2005, subtitled ‘Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters.’ Its successor, the Sendai Framework of 2015, continued the approach. Cities now publish resilience strategies covering flooding, heat waves and supply-chain failures, and banks are tested for financial resilience against economic shocks.

The word’s popularity has drawn criticism. Some scholars argue that praising individual resilience can shift responsibility away from the institutions that create hardship in the first place. Psychologists also stress that resilience does not mean feeling no pain. Resilient people grieve, worry and struggle; what marks them is that they recover and adapt over time.