This Resilience Scan summarises writing and debates in the field of resilience during the fourth quarter of 2016. It comprises an 'expert view' on an aspect of resilience in practice, analysis of blogs from the past six months, and summaries of high-impact grey literature and academic journal articles. The final chapter synthesises the insights from literature in terms of five characteristics of resilience: awareness, diversity, self-regulation, integration and adaptiveness.

Challenges for the future resilience agenda

In this report, our 'expert view' summarises some the emerging challenges for resilience practice based on a review of recent academic literature. Key areas for the future agenda include the role of resilience as an integrating concept, measurement challenges, issues of dependency and agency, social values and transformation, and critiques of resilience as an emerging narrative for international development.

Resilience in the blogosphere

While urban, agriculture and water issues continue to dominate resilience discussions, common themes in blogs reviewed in this Scan included the role of social processes and the role of (big) data in tracking and supporting resilience.

Resilience in the grey literature

This Scan identifies seven broad themes in the reviewed grey literature from this quarter. Compared with the previous quarter’s Resilience Scan, there has been an increase in the numbers of publications considering Agenda 2030 and a decrease in those discussing migration.

Resilience in the academic literature

Six dominant themes emerged from the review of academic literature from this quarter, of which the most prevalent was adaptiveness. Four of the articles assessed adaptive practices in agriculture, forestry and pastoralism.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute