ABSTRACT

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade or more to become one of the key terms in

international policy and academic discussions. Whatever the subject matter of concern – whether

it comes to questions of conflict management, the response to economic crisis, the mitigation

of climate change, the challenges of urban poverty or disaster risk management – questions of

resilience will be at the forefront. Leading international institutions, such as the United Nations,

the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, government agencies

and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups are all

promoting the importance of resilience, formulating various conceptions of what it might be and

how to achieve it and developing indicators to measure it. However, with the rapid rise of

resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and

approaches should come together to operationalise it (Hussain, 2013).