What do we mean by ‘community resilience’? A systematic literature review of how it is defined in the literature

While government, industry and charitable organisations have an increasing focus on programs intended to support community resilience to disasters, no consensus been reached as to what defines ‘community resilience’ and what its core characteristics are.

This paper features a systematic literature review of definitions of community resilience related to disasters.An inductive thematic analysis of the definitions and descriptions was conducted in order to determine the proposed characteristics of community resilience prior to, during and after a disaster.

Among 80 relevant papers, there was no evidence of a common, agreed definition of community resilience. However, nine core elements of community resilience appeared to be common among the definition:

• local knowledge;
• community networks and relationships;
• communication;
• health;
• governance and leadership;
• resources;
• economic investment;
• preparedness; and
• mental outlook.

Within these core elements, the paper identified 19 sub-elements linked to community resilience.

The findings show that community resilience remains an amorphous concept that is understood and applied differently by different research groups. Yet in spite of the differences in conception and application, there are well-understood elements that are widely proposed as important for a resilient community. A focus on these individual elements may be more productive than attempting to define and study community resilience as a distinct concept.