Resilience, Reimagined: What It Really Means for Local Communities
We hear “resilience” everywhere, calls to build resilient cities, resilient supply chains, resilient people. Yet for many local communities the word can feel like a polite way of saying “brace for impact.” If resilience is reduced to bouncing back to the way things were, it risks becoming a mandate to absorb shocks without changing the conditions that made people vulnerable in the first place. In practice, resilience worth having is less about elasticity and more about agency: the power of communities to decide what to protect, what to let go of, and when to transform rather than “return to normal.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change frames climate-resilient development as an integration of adaptation and mitigation with equity and justice, while recognizing Indigenous and local knowledge as essential to doing it well (IPCC, 2022). That is a profound shift from technocratic “fixes” toward democratic problem-solving. A second shift is overdue: from projectizing resilience t...