With the passing of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, community resilience has transcended from being a buzzword to being at the foreground of numerous development agencies and NGOs and conceptualized in much of the international development literature (Adger 2000; Bene, Chowdhury, Rashid, Dhali, and Jahan 2017; Walker, Brian, C. S. Holling, Stephen Carpenter, and Ann Kinzig 2004). Understood generally, community resilience is the ability of communities to adapt, absorb, mitigate, and recover from shocks and stressors in such a way that facilitates positive future outcomes and reduces overall vulnerability to future shocks and stressors (Adger 2000; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche and Pfefferbaum 2008; USAID 2013; Walker et al. 2004). The core of this definition relates to sustainability and the capability of socio-ecological systems and communities to adapt and transform to both fluctuations and stressors (Milman and Short 2008; Walker et al. 2004). This meta-study seeks to shed light on how the large body of international development literature addresses, measures, and operationalizes community resilience. This meta-study uses two resilience frameworks to understand and codify dominant themes in community resilience to assess whether the international development literature is holistically studying community resilience by touching upon nutrition, food security, economic security, and ecological sustainability. This serves to identify themes in the existing literature for which elements of community resilience are most studied and subsequently, most excluded, and the implications of this.
