Economic Resilience

Economic resilience refers to the capacity of an economy, region, community, or household to withstand, adapt to, and recover from shocks such as recessions, financial crises, natural disasters, pandemics, or industrial decline, and in some accounts to transform in ways that reduce future vulnerability. C. S. Holling’s ecological work distinguished engineering resilience, the speed of return to equilibrium, from ecological resilience, the capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize. Ron Martin and Peter Sunley applied the concept to regional economies, emphasizing resistance, recovery, renewal, and reorientation, and Adam Rose developed measures of resilience to disasters. Karl Polanyi’s analysis of protective countermovements and Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis illuminate why shocks propagate. Eric Klinenberg’s study of the Chicago heat wave and Kathleen Tierney’s work on disasters show that social networks and institutions shape who recovers. Michael Ungar and Fikret Berkes stress social and ecological foundations of resilience, and Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility emphasizes gains from disorder. Critics, including David Harvey and Jamie Peck, argue that resilience discourse can shift responsibility onto communities while ignoring structural causes and austerity. Economic resilience remains central to research on regional development, inequality, disasters, welfare, and sustainability.