Understanding Societal Resilience

Societal resilience is an emerging paradigm. It refers to responses and strategies at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and societies that are dealing with complex societal problems. At the same time, these responses contribute to innovative solutions that make society more resilient to current and future challenges. Societal resilience is, however, conceptually relatively undefined. This ambiguity is generally seen as problematic for scholarly work. In this chapter, the authors show that societal resilience is an important social concept because of its openness. To study resilience requires research methodologies that engage many actual stakeholders. Collaborating with societal stakeholders allows not only for co-generating knowledge of local relevance, but also stimulating a comprehensive and critical research approach. Therefore, the current openness of societal resilience does not constitute an undesirable theory gap. It enables the possibility of having plural perspectives based on the complex realities on the ground.

Toward a Multisystemic Resilience Framework for Migrant Youth

This chapter proposes an integrative framework to understand the resilience of youth in the context of migration. It first refines the concept of resilience and provides a definition particularly for this population—a process toward positive adaptation and development despite the challenging environmental changes and life transitions that occur during migration. Considering that this process is influenced by various factors embedded in multiple systems, the authors propose a Multisystemic Resilience Framework for migrant youth that uses the photosynthesis of green plants as an analogy to demonstrate in a leaf-shaped figure the dynamic process of resilience shaped by three interactive systems: intrapersonal microsystem, interpersonal mesosystem, and institutional macrosystem. Migrant youths are positioned as active agents in the center who mobilize resources from and facilitate interactions across multiple systems. The chapter concludes by illustrating the complex interplay between systems in the framework and discussing potential implications for research, policy, and practice.

Risk and Resilience in Pregnancy and Birth

Pregnancy, birth, and becoming a parent involves substantial changes at biological, psychological, social, and broader cultural levels. As such, it is a continuing process of adaptation to change and new demands. This chapter provides an overview of risk and resilience in pregnancy, birth, and the transition to parenthood and the impact of these experiences on both women and their infants. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of experiences of pregnancy and birth and risks that arise, in particular trauma that may be experienced during birth. The second part looks at resilience in pregnancy and birth, what we know, and what we still need to know in this area. The third part looks at theories of resilience relevant to the perinatal period and how it is important to look at resilience at different levels (e.g. epi/genetic, personal attributes, relationships, support systems, culture, and environment). The authors conclude with key considerations for future research and theory in this area.

Thinking Systemically About Transitional Justice, Legal Systems, and Resilience

Transitional justice refers to the set of judicial and non-judicial processes that societies may use to deal with legacies of past human rights abuses and atrocities. While the field is rapidly expanding, to date there are almost no systematic analyses of transitional justice within a resilience framework, or vice versa. The purpose of this chapter is to address that gap and to demonstrate why resilience is highly relevant for transitional justice theory and practice. It argues that resilience thinking can enhance the impact of transitional justice on the ground, by contributing to the development of more ecological approaches to dealing with the past that locate individuals within their broader social environments. The chapter also reflects on the conceptual and empirical utility of resilience as a concept that opens up a space for analyzing the wider societal and systemic impact of legal systems more generally.

Social Ecology of Police Resilience

Research shows that police work is one of the most stressful professions in the world, and police officers typically suffer a variety of physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects and symptoms. Thus, constant exposure to stressful situations requires resilient police officers. Legislation, social support, organizational factors, and individual resources all play different roles in maintaining resilience among police officers. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a multisystemic ecological theory of police resilience. By applying this analytical approach, the authors illustrate how systems on different levels interact with each other reciprocally. They conclude that resilience is necessary for officers to have the capacity to act authoritatively in uncertain situations. The use of multisystemic social-ecological theory provides a deeper understanding of the processes that contribute to positive development in professionally stressful contexts.

The Social Contexts of Resilient Architecture

In architecture, the term resilience tends to be used narrowly describe a building’s structural and environmental performance in quantitative terms—but can a building be called resilient if it fails to make inspiring spaces for people, promote well-being, or improve people’s experience? The chapter begins by exploring how the term is currently evaluated in and around buildings, through discussion of related concepts such as sustainability, passive survivability, and performance gaps. The chapter traces the emergence of a new generation of building evaluation metrics and certification systems that are focused not solely on environmental performance but also consider synergies between people’s experience and our natural resources, such as Active House. The work of GXN and 3XN in Denmark are discussed, in relation to how their research explores resilience and sustainability by focusing on the social aspects of how buildings make people feel. Examples from the multifunctional, process-based strategies used in a series of new climate adaptation renovations in Copenhagen, Denmark, are discussed as exemplary resilient design projects that address neighborhood flooding by simultaneously improving the qualities of public spaces and better connecting people to nature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how locally specific and socially focused designs can support more resilient environments for people.

A Transactional, Whole-School Approach to Resilience

In contrast to the earlier understandings of resilience for the select, invulnerable few, an ecological perspective provides the opportunity for all children to develop resilience given resilience-enhancing, protective social contexts. In this chapter, the author explores a transactional-ecological perspective of resilience in the context of educational systems, underlining the limitations of an overreliance on the individual in resilience building. The chapter presents a transactional, whole-school, resilience framework for educational systems informed by the research evidence, focusing on both curricular competence-building and contextual processes across multiple systems. The chapter concludes with an illustration of a recent resilience program, RESCUR Surfing the Waves, informed by this approach.

Resilience of Legal Systems

Resilience theory, also known as resilience thinking, has emerged as a powerful theoretical framework for many disciplines. Legal theorists have, however, only in the past decade begun to contextualize resilience thinking for legal systems. This chapter summarizes where resilience thinking has gone thus far in legal theory and recommends where it should go from here. The authors start by asking the two fundamental questions of resilience thinking, putting them in the context of legal systems: resilience of what and resilience to what? Because of the special role legal systems play in the governance of complex social-ecological systems, the authors add a third question: resilience for what? We then explore five key features of system resilience as they relate to legal systems: (a) reliability, (b) efficiency, (c) scalability, (d) modularity, and (e) evolvability. Using environmental law as a case study, the discussion offers concrete examples of how each property manifests and operates in legal systems. The authors close with an exploration of how what has been learned thus far about legal system resilience from theoretical research and practical experiences should shape future research, in particular toward a deeper understanding of adaptive governance.

What Does It Take for Early Relationships to Remain Secure in the Face of Adversity?

Attachment relationships as bipersonal, dynamic systems of interaction and meaning-making, can be understood as a resilient mechanism, a level of resilience in itself. A resilient early attachment relationship may facilitate resilience across development and interact with other factors to promote healthier, more resilient societies at different ecological levels. In this chapter, first, the concept of attachment resilience and its constituent factors are developed within the framework of resilience literature. Second, the ecological nature of attachment resilience is posited, and a set of four principles for the ecological study and enhancement of attachment resilience is presented and applied to a case study. Finally, a discussion of the implications of these ideas for interventions with families is developed.

Transformative Social Innovation and Multisystemic Resilience

To illustrate the relationship between transformative social innovation and multisystem resilience, this chapter summarizes three transformative social innovations, the National Parks in the United States, the internet, and the challenging or social engineering–like case of the intelligence test. Each case study demonstrates how innovations shift several systems as they develop, scale up, and even became challenged themselves, as well as the authors’ overarching assertion that transformative social innovation and multisystem resilience are deeply interrelated. Additionally, it is by understanding our social innovation history that we can be better prepared for our future and avoid the pitfalls of social innovation’s underappreciated dark side, the risk of social engineering. This chapter is based on over a decade of work on multisystem resilience and social innovation at the Waterloo Institute of Social Innovation and Resilience.