Resilience

Resilience is a polysemous concept, originated from physical dynamics (assessed as the time spent to come back to a normal situation after a disruption), then transferred to the social sciences and invested in particular in psychology (capacity to recover from a trauma), economics ( strength to a choc) or social issues (we speak then about resilient communities). It can be defined as the capacity of an individual, a collective, an organization or an (eco)system to rectrieve a normal activity after a disruption in its working process, or as the “level of disruption or tension that an (eco)system can take in while remaining able to come back to its previous state [1]”. Here, we favor its application in the ecological field, in which it “keeps […] the primitive physical meaning [and] depends on the intensity of the disruption. Under this form, the concept joins a paradigm of mono-balance, in which every system only knows one state of balance from which it goes away more or less [2]”.
Within the ecosystemic analysis, three answers are distinguished when facing an external disruption : resilience, resistance and persistence [3]. The notion of resilience is then a tool bringing strategic help in the service of a new form of risk management, based on the link between vulnerability and resilience [4] and aims to reduce as much as possible the randomness impacts, and not to resist to them [5].