Resilience as a concept has existed for centuries. It has received increasing attention during the world’s COVID pandemic experience, as societies had to adjust not only to a life-threatening disease, but also the effects that it imposed that had social, cultural, economic, and political consequences with unequal impact, an impact of increasing complexity when considered in conjunction with the opportunities and challenges of globalized societies, such as fragile global supply chains. Resilience today has multiple definitions, many of which are discipline-, location-, and/or context-specific. There are models that consider resilience in terms of socio-ecological systems, socio-technical networks, and complex adaptive systems. While these approaches, considerations, and models continue to advance resilience research, there are some gaps in understanding how different societies of the world respond and recover from systemic shocks.
Social science has seen a steady growth on resilience research. Current literature tends to follow two primary tracts: conservative resilience, which is akin to achieving stability after disruption and persist in its current state, and transformative resilience, which considers systemic renewal or adaptation after experiencing shock(s) resulting in a change. Many studies concentrate on specific shocks, such as disaster response, climate change, or specific traumas. The most recent theoretical addition is equitable resilience, which considers social vulnerabilities and [un]equal access to power and resources (Matin, Forrester, & Ensor, 2018). Within this literature, a small subset uses the term “social resilience,” which generally combines the two tracts mentioned above, focuses on a specific shock, and examines one or more social effects on the group level. Most recently, in response to the recent pandemic, societal resilience research has begun to expand. This growth is important because a large percentage of existing resilience research focuses on the individual level, which while important, does not usually consider different societal structures, social networks, and models that may espouse differing preferences for collectivism, family, generation, culture, language, gender, relationship to nature, lifestyle, communication, technology, health, societal norms, and worldview, among other potential variables and values. Understanding these variables in the context of absorbing and recovering from multiple systemic shocks and in co-occurrence with other systems at different timescales underscores the need for more research on societal resilience globally, which may require interconnected but distinct conceptualizations at various levels/scales. This topic calls for development of the science of societal resilience with consideration for societal variations and values.
For purposes of this topic, societal resilience is meant broadly as a society’s ability to absorb, and when necessary, adapt to and/or bounce back from multiple disruptive external and/or internal shocks experienced at the same time, in close proximity, or as consequences to previous shock(s), with consideration for that society’s organization, culture, and values. Because this preliminary definition is meant as a starting point and does not distinguish between conservative and transformative resilience or consider specific variables or regions, proposers should refine as needed to support the proposed research. Differences that may occur societally across the world are critical aspects of this topic, particularly as these societies experience complex, systemic, shocks or disruptions that may include sociotechnical components and affect people globally, albeit unevenly. The topic does not prescribe any particular use case(s) but does anticipate that focusing solely on one type of shock or societal sector will be insufficient to meet the topic’s intent. Experimental approaches are encouraged.
Key areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Develop theory/ies and refined definition(s) that consider societal resilience with cooccurring systems across the globe at multiple levels/scales
• Conduct cross-cultural comparative studies on societal resilience in various regions or contexts and explore the techniques used in different societies to absorb and recover from systemic shocks
• Discover how societal resilience as a concept should be constructed from non-Western perspectives and explore whether new methods are required to understand and assess such resilience
• Assess and test whether the concept of equitable societal resilience can be developed and measured
• Explore how to integrate local, indigenous knowledge systematically best and appropriately into societal resilience and determine how this knowledge revises the construct, if it does, and if so, how it affects different levels and scales
• Measure societal resilience worldwide at national and, if possible, sub-national or other levels/scales, with consideration for local assessment of societal resilience, and determine how best to normalize these measures, if appropriate
- Identify key variables that influence type of and effectiveness of co-occurring societal resilience responses and outcomes (conservative, transformational) and how that differs based on shock characteristics (intensity, duration, timescale, etc.)
• How does co-occurring societal resilience look under different types of stress, atypical compared to systemic, and when types differ between systems (e.g., societal resiliency in response to a prolonged, low intensity systemic shock and economic resiliency in response to an acute, momentary shock), and how does this look at different levels
• Develop methods and/or models to understand when societal resilience(s) will yield a conversative compared to a transformational outcome, to incorporate any new resilience methods/models resulting from data analysis