ABSTRACT
In recent years, and certainly the last decade, resilience theory has recast human ecology as complex, dynamic and adaptive, thus undermining or at least questioning assumptions of stasis and equilibrium that lie at the heart of sustainability constructs. Scientific displacement of sustainability has been accompanied by rising institutional and popular attachment to the resilience notion. The new social scientific enthusiasm for resilience flags the danger of commonsensical application, namely, the transposition of a scientific concept across disciplinary understandings through the medium of conventional wisdom. For Davidson, the inability of resilience discourse and policy to, as yet, account for human agency is its greatest failure and the deepest source of her ‘nagging doubts’ about its wider human deployment. The policy sciences and public institutions are close on planning’s heels in adopting the resilience ideal as a marker of collective purpose.
