On Some Foundational Issues Concerning the Relationship Between Risk and Resilience

Abstract

“Risk” and “resilience” are both terms with a long history, but how they are related and should be related are strongly debated. This article discusses the appropriateness of a perspective advocated by an active “resilience school” that sees risk as a change in critical system functionality, as a result of an event (disturbance, hazard, threat, accident), but not covering the recovery from the event. From this perspective, two theses are examined: risk and resilience are disjunct concepts, and risk is an aspect of resilience. Through the use of several examples and reasoning, the article shows that this perspective challenges daily-life uses of the risk term, common practices of risk assessments and risk management, as well as contemporary risk science. A fundamental problem with the perspective is that system recovery is also an important aspect of risk, not only of resilience. Risk and resilience analysis and management implications of the conceptual analysis are also discussed.