In the academic literature, different terms are used to refer to resilience held at a group-level including ‘community resilience’ (Brown and Kulig, 1996), ‘social resilience’ (Maclean et al., 2014) ‘urban resilience’, ‘social-ecological resilience’ and ‘societal resilience’, which in many instances are used interchangeably (Boon et al. 2012).

Contested and overlapping definitions

Like the term ‘resilience’, each of these sub-definitions are contested. For instance, Schäfer et al., (2024) distinguishes social resilience from societal resilience by describing it as “perceived and available resources in one’s social environment such as perceived social support and family cohesion”, whereas seminal definitions of social resilience by Adger (1998; 2000) “the ability of the social system to withstand external shocks to the system” are more societal in scope and early work had a preoccupation with external factors like livelihoods and resource use - a theme in the literature that continues to this day. A 2019 review titled “Social Dimensions of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems”, for instance, primarily looks at human relationships with their environment in terms of natural resource use, using fisheries and coral reefs as examples.

In this wiki we consider these terms to be vague enough that they are somewhat interchangeable and that societal resilience is a broad enough concept to necessitate and entail the others. Further we propose that neither community nor social resilience can be assumed to concern psycho-social factors like social support or family cohesion, and so this must be made explicit where it is the case.

For comparison, a quick indicative search of academic databases undertaken in early 2025 revealed the following:

Definitions

Community Resilience

Social Resilience

Urban Resilience

Social-Ecological Resilience

Family Resilience

See also:

How Can We Measure Collective (Social/Community/Urban) Resilience?