ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the theoretical framework and concepts used to examine global and local meanings of resilience for the purpose of explaining the limited outcomes of the global advocacy on Disaster Risk Reduction. It explains how critical realism provides a useful approach for examining worldviews of resilience, how disaster risk and disaster resilience is theorised and how it provides analytical space for dealing with normative questions that arise from an empirically based understanding of reality. In order to understand the causal structures that influence how societies think about disaster risk, a conceptual framework is developed on the premises of critical realism. Articulating the assumptions on the nature of reality and the production of knowledge also provides a nuanced perspective on disaster risk and resilience as a process. A two-step process is used to uncover and understand different worldviews of resilience and how they relate to the production of disaster resilience activity.
