How do we know about resilience? An analysis of empirical research on resilience, and implications for interdisciplinary praxis

Abstract

We sought to understand how knowledge about resilience is produced. We examined empirical research into resilience from the social and natural sciences, randomly selected a sample of these studies and analysed their methods using common criteria to enable comparison. We found that studies of resilience from social scientists largely focus on the response of individuals to human-induced change events, while those from natural scientists largely focus on the response of ecological communities and populations to both environmental and human-induced change events. Most studies were of change over short time periods and focused on small spatial scales. Social science studies were dominated by one..