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Lennart Olsson, LUCSUS

Lennart Olsson

Professor, Docent

Lennart Olsson, LUCSUS

Is resilience a normative concept?

Author

  • Henrik Thorén
  • Lennart Olsson

Summary, in English

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged.

Department/s

  • LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)

Publishing year

2018

Language

English

Pages

112-128

Publication/Series

Resilience - International Policies, Practices and Discourses

Volume

6

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Philosophy

Keywords

  • Resilience
  • normativity
  • concepts

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2169-3293