Is Resilience Measurable?

Abstract

Resilience has moved from a descriptive scientific concept to a normative imperative on the international and national policy agendas. Assessing resilience is often seen as a necessity to implement it. The proliferation of methods, indicators and tools echoes the failure to produce universal, consensual and empirically validated indices, challenging the very possibility of measuring resilience. After disentangling the polysemy of the term in the environmental field, I review the different approaches used in resilience measurement, highlighting their limitations to propose three levels of explanation. First, I link the difficulties of measuring resilience to the theoretical impasses and definitional vagueness that characterize the term. Second, I highlight the contradiction of trying to measure a complex, multi-dimensional, multi-scale reality with tools that intrinsically reduce complexity. Finally, I argue that resilience is a political construction, whose content is not a priori given. How resilience is defined reflects subjective judgments, values, beliefs, ideologies, which vary across individuals, places and times. I therefore recommend considering resilience not as an objective, but as a method for de-compartmentalizing public policies and improve governance of security. This approach does not imply giving up on evaluation and measurement, but rather prioritizing what can (and should) be evaluated.