Resilience Concept

Origins, development of resilience concept and its dimensions

The term resilience is derived from the Latin word resilire, which means “to rebound or recoil.” (Hoddinott, 2014). Although the concept of resilience has been applied in the field of engineering, ecology, and psychology, very recently, resilience has become widely used by humanitarian and development actors working across diverse thematic areas such as, disaster risk reduction, climate change, urban planning, ecosystem management, peace-building, and food and nutrition security (Béné et al., 2012; Frankerberg, 2012; Constas & Barrett, 2013; Maxwell et al., 2013; Mitchell, 2013; Hoddinott, 2014). Similarly, it is argued that resilience is a newly added concept into development discourse . Owing to its diversified roots of origin, several definitions exist and each organization tends to understand and interpret resilience differently, sometimes to fit their own purposes.

However, Holling, the founding father of "ecological resilience" defined resilience as" a measure of the persistency of systems and of their ability to absorb change and

5). Considering similarities among the different definitions of resilience, Constas, et al. (2014) defined resilience as: “Resilience is the capacity that ensures adverse stressors and shocks do not have long‐lasting adverse development consequences” (p. 6). In this regard, stress is to indicate the “enduring shifts” (such as seasonality and trends) and shocks is for “transient disruption” (Leach et al., 2007). Despite different definitions of resilience exist, for the purpose of this research, the definition given by Constas et al. (2014) will be adopted as an operational