ABSTRACT
Disaster resilience is an important goal in communities and in engineered systems. The ability of communities, and the systems on which society depends, to “bend without breaking” or to “fail gracefully” has achieved considerable attention among social scientists and engineers, and is being increasingly applied to disaster policy and planning. However, considerable challenges complicate building resilience in social or engineered systems. These challenges include inconsistent definitions of resilience, the lack of political commitment to the broad idea of resilience, the problems of intergovernmental policy formulation and implementation, and problems of citizen perception of resilience efforts. This chapter reviews these challenges both to explain why they are so daunting, and to describe the conditions under which resilience can be achieved. We conclude that efforts to promote resilience already exist in the United States, but that these efforts are unevenly distributed, leaving many communities and their infrastructure vulnerable to long-term damage from which recovery, in the event of a disaster, will be more difficult than it need be.
