As laid out on this page, the academic inquiry into resilience at a collective level is fragmented across many different academic fields encompassing the deep past (e.g. collapsology), the distant future (e.g. existential risk studies) and very different professional domains (e.g. defence, epidemiology, urban planning). This 2024 academic literature review of community resilience, for example, describes the subject as a ‘boundary object’ - a concept that doesn’t sit squarely within one discipline but is functionally vague enough to be shared by many disciplines for the purpose of transdisciplinary collaboration and sense-making. The paper discusses definitions, government/NGO strategies and what they cover, with a primary focus on structural and material aspects but some discussion of the importance of social capital. This reflects the fact that what research has been done on the psycho-social dimension has tended to focus on the role of social relationships. For instance, a systematic review of 50 studies examining resilience factors in OECD countries found that:
“at the social level, research very much focused on (perceived) social support. This might also reflect that societal challenges often impact on social relationships making them a focus of research. In line with previous reviews on social support, we found mostly favorable effects of perceived social support with the majority of studies reporting very small to small positive effects.” (Schäfer et al., 2024)
Having said this, other literature reviews have identified other community characteristics that are also important for resilience:
“Dimensions that have significant influence… include: social capital, social support, collective efficacy, connectedness, the sense of trust and belonging of the individual to the community and his or her place-attachment.“ - Cohen el al. (2013)
There is significant overlap in these concepts, however, with definitions of social capital sometimes including connectedness and trust, for example. Given social capital is both critiqued for being too narrow a concept and for being too messy and vague, some efforts have been made to bring great nuance and clarity to the mechanisms at play. For instance, Saja et al. (2021) propose differentiation of capacities in terms of time period, social systems, social mechanisms and scales (individual, family, organisation, social group & community):
Figure taken from Saja et al. (2021). Systems thinking to define social resilience as abilities of social entities and mechanisms
Beyond social capital
Some attempts have been made to overcome the reliance on the concept of social capital by advocating for other psycho-social constructs in theory and research. In a paper titled What lies beyond social capital? the role of social psychology in building community resilience to climate change, Ntontis et al. (2019) for instance argue that social capital cannot account for group behaviour that emerges in the absence of any pre-existing ties and social support:
“We propose a new conceptualisation of aspects of community resilience based on the social identity approach in social psychology and grounded upon the principles of collective psychosocial resilience – the way that shared identification allows groups to emerge, coordinate, express solidarity and provide social support. We argue that our approach overcomes the limitations of social capital, because it can explain the processes of group behaviour in disasters, acknowledges people’s propensity to organise collectively, promotes bottom-up approaches to community resilience, recognises emergent communities, and suggests evidence-based recommendations for policy and practice. “
In a rapid review of the “social dimensions of resilience in the context of climate change”, Qamar (2023) added two categories alongside social capital: ‘social psychological approaches’ and ‘human rights-based approaches’. Although the latter has an ‘inner’ component in as much as it concerns collective beliefs and narratives relating to inequality and marginalisation, it largely understands resilience in terms of equity and power within socio-political and economic systems. The former, social psychological approaches, includes dimensions of psychological development most often considered at an individual level but which also can be considered at a group level, such as hope, self-efficacy, and optimism, and also “social identity, reciprocity, altruistic behaviour, sense of responsibility, and shared knowledge of risk and responsibility that contribute to collective psycho-social resources ”
Psychological resilience, mental health and wellbeing
Individual resilience and maintained wellbeing under stressful conditions have been studied since World War II. The literature includes the fields of psychology, public and clinical health, and leadership and organisational development. Mental health research has been criticised for not giving enough attention to context, or acknowledging that “resilience-enablers are just as likely to be external as internal”, particularly at the level of the community (Ungar & Theronm, 2020). There have been recent attempts to broaden the view of mental health scholars and practitioners to consider resilience in a more systemic light and develop “understanding of the multiple, interacting systems that facilitate the mental health of individuals challenged by atypical stress” (ibid.). This ‘multiple interacting systems account’ frames human resilience as an emergent phenomena that arises through the interaction of biological, psychological, social, built and ecological conditions. Whichever level of resilience is of most interest for a particular study or intervention - biological, psychological, ecological etc - will refract and include the other elements.
Much of the literature on resilience has examined children and adolescents under traumatic events or adverse experiences, and in this context lists or frameworks have been proposed for the most important conditions of resilience at individual, family and social levels, such as ‘Masten's shortlist’ below:
Masten's shortlist of multisystem resilience factors taken from Mesman et al. (2021)
Another list from a cross-cultural study by Ungar et al. (2007), features ‘seven tensions’:
Seven Tensions