The term ‘resilience’ comes from the Latin (resilire) and means to bounce back or rebound (Thun-Hohenstein et al., 2020). Accordingly, the term was initially used in the early 19th century in material sciences and referred to the ability of materials to absorb deformations without becoming permanently deformed (Sudmeier-Rieux, 2014).

Since the 1970s, psychological research has taken up the concept of resilience (Block and Block, 1977), among other things to describe the ability of people to recover from traumatic events (Nutting and Norris, 1968; Werner, 1989).

Resilience’ gained great importance in ecosystem research. Initially, the focus was on so-called ‘engineering resilience’ (Holling, 1973; Hollnagel et al., 2006), which describes the ability of ecosystems to cope with and survive external stress. Changes in the overall system can throw the ecosystem (‘the sphere’) out of balance. Similar to, for example, a lake that eventually ‘tips over’ due to continuous discharge of wastewater. Resilience here therefore refers to the resilience of the lake ecosystem to external influence (i.e., contamination from the effluents).

Figure 1: Engineering and ecological resilience (Hoang et al., 2017).

However, as (eco)systems can have several, different states of equilibrium, the idea of ‘engineering resilience’ has been extended to ‘ecological resilience’ (Holling, 1973; Hollnagel et al., 2006). This is based on the understanding that a system can have several stable states. Thus, the recovery of an ecosystem does not necessarily mean a return to the initial conditions.

This understanding of resilience was later extended to social-ecological systems, thus providing a conceptual framework of nested systems interacting across scales (so-called panarchy) (Holling and Gunderson, 2002; Folke, 2006). A strong focus is placed on the transformations and interactions of systems across scales. They grow, mature, collapse, renew themselves and in the process continually open new ”windows of opportunities”. Resilience is understood here rather as an ongoing process of transformation and adaptation, also enabled by learning, and remembering from past transformations.

Figure 2: Panarchy (Source: Resilience Alliance, 2023).