Multi-Level Resilience: Reconciling Robustness, Recovery and Adaptability from a Network Science Perspective

2. Robustness, Recovery And Adaptability As Building Blocks Of Resilience

The idea of resilience originates from disparate fields and is not yet clearly defined in a trans-disciplinary fashion (Deffuant & Gilbert, 2011; Hollnagel et al., 2006). This lack of conceptual cohesion can be problematic when trying to understand the resilience of, e.g., heterogeneous infrastructures which themselves reflect an amalgam of different engineering, economic and social science paradigms. Although the models and definitions employed across these disciplines vary widely, they can be organised along thematic lines that reveal core aspects of resilience at a basic conceptual level. In this section, we list some examples of resilience language used by different disciplines, highlighting a degree of conceptual resonance that distinguishes three specific aspects of resilience: robustness, recovery and adaptability.