The Resilience Concept: From its historical roots to theoretical framework for critical infrastructure design

Abstract

The initial article chooses a historical approach to the theoretical discussion of resilience notions by reconstructing the emergence of its manifold layers of meaning. The first part focuses on metaphor and concept transfers, each of which has produced a disciplinary conceptual tradition and a culture of resilience. The second part then describes the genesis of the system-theoretical “resilience framework” of the biologist and ecosystem researcher C. S. Holling, which still shapes the resilience discourse to this day. The second article reconstructs the roots and the development steps of the concept of resilience in energy systems, starting in the alternative energy discourse in the early 1970ies and ending in the first elaborated theory of resilient energy system design by Amory Lovins in 1982. Risk management and resilience management share important features and they both aim at preparing systems for uncertain threats or stressors and their impacts. Still, the level of uncertainty regarding stressors and impacts, the type of systems addressed and the systems’ dynamics allow for a distinction between the applicability of either risk or resilience management. The third article provides a short introduction to the specifics of each strategy for coping with uncertainty and presents guidelines for designing a resilient critical infrastructure.