3D Resilience

3D Resilience

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I recently discovered news aggregator Feedly. Having been released in 2008, I’m a little behind the curve!

For some time I’ve seen the inherent value of RSS feeds, but haven’t been able to figure out a way of making them work for me. However, Feedly (I’m not on commission, I’m sure other products are available!) seems to do just what I’ve been looking for. I have begun using Feedly to collate resilience blogs that I regularly check in on, and it’s really handy to have summaries available on the go without having to navigate to particular blogs.

Today Chris Bene’s article Making the Most of Resilience popped up in my feed, so I thought I’d check it out, and I’m glad I did.

Whilst primarily approaching resilience from a development angle, a diagram explaining resilience is applicable in an emergency management context.

3d resilience

Bene states that three types of capacity are important in living with change and uncertainty

  • absorptive capacity – the ability to cope with the effects of shocks and stresses
  • adaptive capacity – the ability of individuals or societies to adjust and adapt to shocks and stresses, but keep the overall system functioning in broadly the same way
  • transformative capacity – the ability to change the system fundamentally when the way it works is no longer viable

Im my experience, much of the work on resilience in a UK context is around developing the former, and it links back to an earlier post about developing a wider range of options for countering terrorism.

How can resilience professionals help to develop ‘softer’ approaches to preparing to emergencies which aren’t just about hardening, strengthening and fallback systems. How can we better embrace opotunities to transform both communities and places? I imagine that developing resilience is more likley to be sucessful where interventions reflect the three dimensions on the continuum.

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