Resilience has experienced exponential growth in scholarship and practice over the past several
decades. We conduct a meta-analysis of recent review papers on resilience from all relevant fields to
distill key themes emanating from both research and practice. These themes reflect prevalent debates,
trends and insights from the thousands of underlying papers. The seven themes are: 1) the distinction
between resilience as a system trait, process, or outcome; 2) the importance of resilience as a strategy
for dealing with uncertainty; 3) a shift from understanding resilience to active resilience-building; 4) the
incorporation of transformation into resilience; 5) the increasingly normative interpretation of
resilience; 6) the growing emphasis on measuring and evaluating resilience; and 7) the mounting
critiques of the resilience agenda demanding attention. We discuss each in detail and find that they help
explain both why resilience has attracted widespread attention, but also why it is an increasingly
contested concept. We offer several steps to engage in productive dialogue across differences in
resilience interpretations and conclude that this inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue is the difficult and
necessary work that must be done, if resilience scholarship and practice is to advance in productive
ways in the future.Susanne Moser et al.
Read full article by Susanne Moser, et al in Climatic Change
