Resilience Practice

In 2006, Resilience Thinking addressed an essential question: As the natural systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, how much can they take and still deliver the services we need from them? This idea caught the attention of both the scientific community and the general public. In Resilience Practice, authors Brian Walker and David Salt take the notion of resilience one step further, applying resilience thinking to real-world situations and exploring how systems can be managed to promote and sustain resilience. The book begins with an overview and introduction to resilience thinking and then takes the reader through the process of describing systems, assessing their resilience, and intervening as appropriate. Following each chapter is a case study of a different type of social-ecological system and how resilience makes a difference to that system in practice. The final chapters explore resilience in other arenas, including on a global scale. Resilience Practice will help people with an interest in the “coping capacity” of systems—from farms and catchments to regions and nations—to better understand how resilience thinking can be put into practice. It offers an easy-to-read but scientifically robust guide through the real-world application of the concept of resilience and is a must read for anyone concerned with the management of systems at any scale.

Overwhelming empirical evidence indicates that new social workers, particularly those going into child welfare or other trauma-related care, will discover emotional challenges including the indirect or secondary effects of the trauma work itself, professional burnout, and compassion fatigue. However, the newly revised CSWE Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) does not mandate the inclusion of content related to self-care in social work curriculum or field education. In a textbook that bridges the gap between theoretical and pragmatic approaches to this important issue in human service work, Jason M. Newell provides a potential resolution by conceptualizing self-care as an ongoing and holistic set of practice behaviors described as the key to professional resilience. To address the effects of trauma-related care on direct practitioners, Newell provides a comprehensive, competency-based model for professional resilience, examining four key constructs—stress, empathy, resilience, and self-care—from a range of theoretical dimensions. For those who work with vulnerable populations, the tendency to frame self-care solely within organizational context overlooks the importance of self-care in domains beyond the agency setting. Alternatively, he uses a framework grounded in the ecological-systems perspective conceptualizing self-care as a broader set of practice behaviors pertaining to the whole person, including the physical, interpersonal, organizational, familial, and spiritual domains of the psychosocial self. Alongside professional self-care practices at the organizational level, Newell makes a case for the pragmatic role of recreational activities, time with family and friends, physical health, spirituality, and mindfulness. The application of a comprehensive approach to self-care practice has potential to empower practitioners to remain resilient and committed to the values, mission, and spirit of the social work profession in the face of trauma.

This book offers a comprehensive view on resilience based upon state-of-the-science theories and methodological applications that resilience may fill. Specifically, this text provides a compendium of knowledge on the theory, methods, and practice of resilience across a variety of country and case contexts, and demonstrates how a resilience-based approach can help further improved infrastructure, vibrant societies, and sustainable environments and ecologies, among many others. Resilience is a term with thousands of years of history. Only recently has resilience been applied to the management of complex interconnected systems, yet its impact as a governing philosophy and an engineering practice has been pronounced. Colloquially, resilience has been used as a synonym for ‘bouncing back’. Philosophically and methodologically, however, it is much more. In a world defined by interconnected and interdependent systems such as water, food, energy, transportation, and the internet, a sudden and unexpected disruption to one critical system can lead to significant challenges for many others. The Science and Practice of Resilience is beneficial for those seeking to gain a rich knowledge of the resilience world, as well as for practitioners looking for methods and tools by which resilience may be applied in real-world contexts.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.

An eternal dilemma for all organizations, and one that a considerable portion of management schools are set up to address, is how to become and stay competitive. Organisational Resilience: Concepts, Integration, and Practice brings together, for the first time, key works that describe the scope and nature of resilience and provides direction to take the field forwards. A response not only to rapidly growing interest in this field, but to the increased importance placed on it, the book presents a broad introduction to research, knowledge, and practice. The book captures the diversity and depth of current thinking about research on organizational-related resilience. The book explains fundamental concepts and clarifies some underlying ideas from diverse fields of resilience-related research. It examines how some of these concepts and ideas have been integrated into specific research activity and used to further develop their respective fields of enquiry. The connecting of concepts and ideas to existing readily helps to progress the development of theory. The book then focuses on aspects of real World practice and experience. However, the central theme about resilience as a concept is that it is not merely concerned with survival pure and simple, but that this survival involves transformation more often than not. Examining resilience at the organizational level, this book clarifies the commonality of concepts and practice that exists among disparate research disciplines and establishes a singular ‘go-to’ work that can be used to develop operational and strategic practices.

Recasting burnout as a crucial phase of service, Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice uses real-world case studies to teach professionals and volunteers unique skills for cultivating resilience. Viewing service and burnout as interdependent throughout phases of stability, collapse, reorganization, and exploitation, the book uniquely combines elements of adaptive resilience theory with contemplative practices and pedagogies. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working at the intersection of service and contemplative practices, this is the first book to demonstrate how and why professionals and volunteers can reframe burnout as an opportunity for resilience-building service. User-friendly case studies provide tools, skills, and exercises for reconstructive next steps. Chapters address personal, group, and structural levels of service and burnout. Illuminating the link between adaptive resilience and burnout as a normal and useful phase of service, Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice is a necessary resource for professionals and volunteers across a wide range of service settings.

Resilience in Children, Adolescents, and Adults: Translating Research into Practice recognizes the growing need to strengthen the links between theory, assessment, interventions, and outcomes to give resilience a stronger empirical base, resulting in more effective interventions and strength-enhancing practice. This comprehensive volume clarifies core constructs of resilience and links these definitions to effective assessment. Leading researchers and clinicians examine effective scales, questionnaires, and other evaluative tools as well as instructive studies on cultural considerations in resilience, resilience in the context of disaster, and age-appropriate interventions. Key coverage addresses diverse approaches and applications in multiple areas across the lifespan. Among the subject areas covered are: - Perceived self-efficacy and its relationship to resilience. - Resilience and mental health promotion in the schools. - Resilience in childhood disorders. - Critical resources for recovering from stress. - Diversity, ecological, and lifespan issues in resilience. - Exploring resilience through the lens of core self-evaluation. Resilience in Children, Adolescents, and Adults is an important resource for researchers, clinicians and allied professionals, and graduate students in such fields as clinical child, school, and developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, education, counseling psychology, social work, and pediatrics.

Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and magnitude of coastal storms around the globe, and the anticipated rise of sea levels will have enormous impact on fragile and vulnerable coastal regions. In the U.S., more than 50% of the population inhabits coastal areas. In Planning for Coastal Resilience, Tim Beatley argues that, in the face of such threats, all future coastal planning and management must reflect a commitment to the concept of resilience. In this timely book, he writes that coastal resilience must become the primary design and planning principle to guide all future development and all future infrastructure decisions. Resilience, Beatley explains, is a profoundly new way of viewing coastal infrastructure—an approach that values smaller, decentralized kinds of energy, water, and transport more suited to the serious physical conditions coastal communities will likely face. Implicit in the notion is an emphasis on taking steps to build adaptive capacity, to be ready ahead of a crisis or disaster. It is anticipatory, conscious, and intentional in its outlook. After defining and explaining coastal resilience, Beatley focuses on what it means in practice. Resilience goes beyond reactive steps to prevent or handle a disaster. It takes a holistic approach to what makes a community resilient, including such factors as social capital and sense of place. Beatley provides case studies of five U.S. coastal communities, and “resilience profiles” of six North American communities, to suggest best practices and to propose guidelines for increasing resilience in threatened communities.