Resilience Capital of Households, Businesses and Social Groups coping with risks

Nowadays Resilience is acknowledged not only as a “super” theory to grasp complexity, contingency and uncertainty of the social-ecological world and its transformations. It has been elevated besides as a path to crisis... [ view full abstract ]

Nowadays Resilience is acknowledged not only as a “super” theory to grasp complexity, contingency and uncertainty of the social-ecological world and its transformations. It has been elevated besides as a path to crisis management as well as a planning policy tool and vision.
Resilience research started from the ecological systems to represent their evolution through a model adaptive cycle of four phases (exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization) where the first two are about attachment and accumulation of resources and the latter about system transfigurations in time and space through release and rearrangement of the stored up resources and assets. Later adoption of resilience by social scientists and planners turns attention to the determinants of resilience in SES and social systems: a) the subject or system under stress/perturbation; b) the triggering factor activating the adaptation; c) the resources accessed and mode of their (re)activation and d) the impacts on the system. Hence in all cases of ecological, SES and social systems the resources (capital) gathered to be reorganized at a later time are vital for realization of the adaptive process.
Up to the present however, research on the nature, spatial-temporal patterns, accessibility and mode of engagement of resilience assets by SES and social systems is lagging behind. The emphasis is on the query “Resilience of what to what” and not on the query “by what means”. In the best case relevant research focuses on macro-indicators indicative only of the possibility of wider systems (e.g. a community as a whole) to become resilient. Examples of such indicators are employment, home ownership, transportation access, health coverage, previous disaster experience, etc.(Cutter et al., 2010). As a result the critics of resilience (especially as a policy tool and objective) highlight failures of research to address resilience inequalities within a community, incompatibilities between personal and collective resilience, adverse impact of resilient agents on vulnerability of the non-resilient etc.
The present paper concentrates on three interconnected topics regarding resilience capital: (a) the types of resources matching the needs of different categories of resilient agents (human individuals, firms, communities); (b) limited availability/accessibility of these resources implying antagonisms among the agents seeking after them; (c) the specific spatial-temporal patterns of these resources which facilitate reorganization of various systems and agents attempting crisis endurance. The respective methodology involves empirical analysis and scrutinization of actual adaptive processes of households, businesses and social groups which are encountered with risks.