“More than any other facet of resilience, social resilience raises the inherent tension within the concept between identity or persistence, and transformation. Is a community the people who make it up, or the geography or physical infrastructure they share? What about the resilience of communities that transform, as a result of a sudden disaster or over time?…. how we identify a community and frame its resilience conveys particular conceptualisations of resilience, which in turn have normative implications for the communities themselves. In part, this is because of the difficulty in capturing important adaptations and transformative actions within and by those communities. Further, measuring and comparing the resilience of communities, and aspects of quantification that go along with selecting, aggregating and comparing indicator values, ensure that the decisions made about how indicators ought to be used carry normative weight” - (Copeland et al., 2020)
Key paper exploring the live question of how to measure social resilience:
- Copeland, S., Comes, T., Bach, S., Nagenborg, M., Schulte, Y., & Doorn, N. (2020). Measuring social resilience: Trade-offs, challenges and opportunities for indicator models in transforming societies. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 51, 101799.
- Doorn, N., Gardoni, P., & Murphy, C. (2019). A multidisciplinary definition and evaluation of resilience: The role of social justice in defining resilience. Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 4(3), 112-123.
- González-Quintero, C., & Avila-Foucat, V. S. (2019). Operationalization and measurement of social-ecological resilience: a systematic review. Sustainability, 11(21), 6073.
- Saja, A. A., Goonetilleke, A., Teo, M., & Ziyath, A. M. (2019). A critical review of social resilience assessment frameworks in disaster management. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 35, 101096.
- Saja, A. A., Teo, M., Goonetilleke, A., & Ziyath, A. M. (2021). Assessing social resilience in disaster management. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 52, 101957.
- Saja, A. A., Teo, M., Goonetilleke, A., & Ziyath, A. M. (2018). An inclusive and adaptive framework for measuring social resilience to disasters. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 28, 862-873.