Resilience

This chapter extends the concept of resilience past its popular use and abuse to consider the deeper set of concepts that shape understandings of stability and instability in ecological relationships. Here, bundles of supporting concepts, each carrying implicit values, threaten to turn a multitude of useful ideas into a mess of conflicting frameworks. While resilience is a concept that developed out of the empirical grounds of ecology, it becomes, for sustainability science, a ‘term of art’ that expands to encompass the qualitative discourses of the humanistic sciences.