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 to localizing it. The energy around Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) reflects hard lessons, too many top-down projects have been culturally misfit, short-lived, or have even deepened inequities. The most thoughtful scholarship is emphatic: local actors must shape priorities, hold purse strings, and define what success looks like; otherwise “local” becomes a logo on a donor slide, not real power. At the same time, LLA is not a magic wand. Without attention to micropolitics, who speaks for whom, who gets invited, who benefits, LLA can reproduce the very injustices it aims to fix. An influential article emphasizes both promise and pitfalls, urging a rigorous focus on power, justice, and metrics grounded in local realities rather than donor checklists (Rahman et al., 2023).

There is also a darker side to the resilience boom: maladaptation. Not all “resilient” actions reduce risk; some unintentionally shift it onto others, lock in exposure, or foreclose future options. Work in Nature Climate Change proposes a continuum from adaptation to maladaptation and offers a framework for “catching maladaptation before it happens” (Magnan et al., 2023). This matters locally: seawalls that worsen erosion downstream, heat measures that exclude renters, or drought responses that undermine smallholder livelihoods are not neutral, they make some communities safer by making others more precarious. Other conceptual advances caution against narrow, infrastructure-only thinking and call for broader social, ecological, and temporal lenses so communities do not buy short-term robustness with long-term fragility (Kofi-Bonsu et al., 2024).

Forests and rural livelihoods provide vivid examples. A synthesis shows how well-meant local adaptations, like crop shifts or intensified extraction to cope with climate stress, can degrade ecosystems and increase vulnerability over time (Kofi-Bonsu et al., 2024). The takeaway is not to slow local action but to widen the frame: ask who gains and who loses, over what time horizon, and how interventions interact with land rights, markets, and governance. Communities are resilient when feedbacks are in their favor, when today’s coping does not erode tomorrow’s capacity.

If resilience is ultimately social, then social infrastructure is core infrastructure. Beyond bridges and levees, think of libraries, plazas, cooperatives, neighborhood kitchens, and faith centers, places and organizations that cultivate trust, norms of reciprocity, and the ability to self-organize. Evidence shows that such spaces enable collective action during and after shocks; they are not just amenities but risk governance assets. A recent scoping review highlights how investment in social infrastructure strengthens resilience by building the everyday ties that become lifelines when systems fail (Enneking et al., 2025).

So what should count as community resilience, and how should we measure it? Traditional indices have matured, but many still overweight what is easy to count and underweight what matters on the ground. The IPCC makes clear that effectiveness, feasibility, and justice must travel together; a flood plan that works only for homeowners, or a heat strategy that ignores informal workers, is not effective by their definition (IPCC, 2022). Emerging “just resilience” frameworks take this seriously, proposing indicators that track distributive, procedural, and recognition justice, who bears risks and who benefits; who participates meaningfully in decisions; whose knowledge and values are recognized (Lager et al., 2023).

A critical, novel reframing follows from all this: resilience is not primarily about hardening systems; it is about widening choices, especially for those with the fewest. That means moving resources closer to frontline decision-makers (and being comfortable with diverse solutions); funding multi-year, flexible grants rather than brittle, short projects; and designing for co-benefits that compound over time (cooler neighborhoods that also grow trust and local enterprise, for instance). It means testing policies for maladaptation risks before rollout and “red-teaming” them with people most likely to be harmed. It also means recognizing that, in some contexts, the resilient move is to transform, to retreat from floodplains with dignity and support, or to shift livelihoods with guaranteed income bridges, rather than to cling to an increasingly unsafe status quo (Magnan et al., 2023; IPCC, 2022).

Finally, a word on humility. “Community resilience” is not something outsiders deliver; it is something communities already practice, often invisibly, through mutual aid, informal economies, and place-based knowledge. Locally Led Adaptation tries to meet people where they are, but it must be willing to share control, pay local experts as experts, and let local definitions of success lead. Success will sound less like “we bounced back” and more like “we chose what to become.” That is resilience reimagined—not a buzzword, but a politics of possibility anchored in justice, social infrastructure, and the courage to transform (Rahman et al., 2023; Enneking et al., 2025; Lager et al., 2023).