Collection
Social Resilience for Sustainability
The concept of social or community resilience has gained in popularity over the last two decades. In the field of sustainability, the term often refers to the ability or process of a community in preparing for, responding to, and transforming due to socio-ecological disruptions. Understanding how communities can successfully respond and adapt to major and often rapid changes in environmental, social, economic or political realms is important for shaping planning, programs and policies aimed to improve such responses. However, the resilience concept is also ambiguous due to contributions from fields as diverse as psychology, urban planning and ecology, due to disagreements in how to measure social resilience, and due to critiques about the lack of discussion related to equity, power and social dynamics. Further, much of the literature around resilience has been theoretical, with limited empirical studies of real-time community resilience (or lack thereof).
This Topical Collection seeks to address these gaps in the social resilience literature by, for example, synthesizing theories from multiple disciplines, integrating issues of equity and power into existing resilience frameworks, and, perhaps most importantly, applying social resilience theories to context-specific examples of resilience-in-action.
The keywords are:
Social Resilience; Community Resilience;Sustainability; Adapation; Equity; Case Study.
Editors
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Vanessa Levesque
Dr. Vanessa Levesque, University of Southern Maine, USA Dr. Levesque is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Southern Maine, in the US. Prior to this position, she was the Lecturer and Assistant Director of the Sustainability Dual Major at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Levesque has also worked in municipal and state government as an environmental planner, with a focus on coastal regions. Dr. Levesque focuses on facilitating collaborative processes, bridging the gap between knowledge and action, and exploring the social drivers and characteristics of sustainability.
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Eileen Johnson
Dr. Eileen Sylvan Johnson, Bowdoin College, USA Dr. Eileen Sylvan Johnson is Lecturer and Program Manager in Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College, USA. Research Interests: community resilience, collaborative resource management, decision support tools.
