Governing for resilience in vulnerable places: An introduction

In the past decades, the term ‘resilience’ has quickly gained currency in academia (including social, political and spatial sciences) as well as in practice. Nowadays, it is widely promoted as a promising concept to deal with shocks and uncertainties in the face of environmental, social and economic crises (cf. Davoudi, 2012; White, 2010). Originating in ecology, resilience was referred to as the ability of a system to return to stability or equilibrium after a disturbance (Pickett et al., 2004). According to an early formulation by Holling (1973), resilience indicates the ability of ecosystems to absorb changes and still be able to function properly. In the past decade, a so-called ‘resilience turn’ (Evans & Reid, 2014) has taken place in the social, political and spatial sciences where social-ecological resilience has been explored and applied as a useful concept to describe and organize responses to change by communities, institutions and economies (Adger, 2000; Klein et al., 2004; White, 2010). In spatial planning, for example, resilience is now widely acknowledged as a new approach to incorporate uncertainty into governance strategies, particularly with respect to natural hazards such as flooding (Davoudi, 2012; White, 2010).