Resilience, Cohesion Policies and the Socio-ecological Crisis

The concept of resilience has been part of the public and academic debate for several years now. Since the 2008 crisis, the social sciences have borrowed from the natural sciences concepts such as fragility, resilience, persistability and adaptability (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). These concepts should help us to interpret and provide keys to guide action in a condition of widespread perception that many things, such as climate, economy, migration, technological innovation and so on, are out of control. Resilience and related concepts are often used in a normative way (Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2013) because they help one imagine new socio-ecological structures that allow societies to be ready for an unstable and uncertain future. Furthermore, due to its interdisciplinary nature, the concept of resilience provides a useful tool for establishing dialogue and integration between different fields of knowledge (Beichler et al. 2014). This is very important, given the increasingly interdependent nature of the crises we are experiencing (Carrosio 2018). That does not mean, however, that the various disciplines share a common definition of resilience; significant semantic shifts have led this concept to take on different meanings. For this reason, its semantic clarity and practical relevance risk being the subject of endless debate.