An emergent means to assurgent ends: Community resilience for safety and sustainability

Societal safety and sustainability are key challenges in our complex and dynamic world, causing growth in interest of applying the concept of resilience in broader societal contexts. This paper presents a concept of Community Resilience that builds on established theory of Resilience Engineering and operationalises the concept by presenting its purpose, required functions and a way to identify and analyse the complex network of actual forms that together achieve these functions in society. The framework for analysing Community Resilience is then tested in practice with interesting results. Although the framework has challenges and limitations, the Resilience Engineering approach to Community Resilience seems to be a both conceptually and pragmatically fruitful path to follow.