Do we practice what we preach? The dissonance between resilience understanding and measurement

Abstract

Resilience is needed to make infrastructures fit for the future, but its operationalization is still lively discussed. Here, we identify three understandings of resilience from the existing literature: resilience as a process, an outcome, and a capacity. We show that all three understandings have their justification, as each plays its part in the core business of resilience, that is, dealing with disruptive events. But, we also find that the trio differs considerably in terms of the implications for the operationalization of resilience. Most importantly, only the understanding of resilience as a capacity allows for a continuous resilience monitoring and a management which is agnostic to the type of disruptive event. We therefore advocate to understand and assess resilience as a capacity. While this understanding is in line with popular opinion, it is often not reflected in the assessment approaches applied. This dissonance shows, for example, in the use of single performance curves to assess resilience. We argue that in order to assess resilience as a capacity, we need to consider multiple performance curves, otherwise we will capture the system's ability to deal with one specific event instead of its ability to deal with any surprises that come its way.