What is equitable resilience?

The document argues that traditional resilience concepts often ignore power dynamics and social inequalities. Based on a review of 171 articles, the authors define equitable resilience as a form of human-environmental resilience that accounts for social vulnerability and differentiated access to power, knowledge, and resources. They propose four essential elements for practice: recognizing subjectivities, ensuring inclusion and representation, working across geographical and temporal scales, and promoting systemic transformation. The brief emphasizes that resilience indicators alone are insufficient and that practitioners must engage with the politics of social change to avoid entrenching existing vulnerabilities.

• Equitable resilience is defined as a form of human-environmental resilience that considers social vulnerability and the unequal access people have to power, knowledge, and resources, starting from the individuals' own perceptions of their position and their need for change to avoid future power imbalances.
• The framework for building equitable resilience consists of four interconnected elements: recognizing subjectivities (how social contexts and power determine entitlements), working toward inclusion and representation to avoid disenfranchisement, attending to multiple levels of governance and scales (geographical and temporal), and promoting system transformation when existing arrangements increase risks or degrade well-being.
• Subjectivities—the lived experiences of individuals shaped by cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender attributes—influence how people interpret events and can be used by authorities to perpetuate inequality through social categorization.
• Inclusion in decision-making is critical for effective interventions, as excluding groups from risk reduction and adaptation processes creates barriers to resilient transformation. This includes the need to consider gender, age, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality, as well as the interests of future generations.
• Scale-related issues in governance can lead to marginalization and conflicting outcomes, where actions that increase resilience at one scale may exacerbate vulnerability at another, such as a city coastal barrier causing problems for poorer outlying coastal communities.
• Transformation is central to equitable resilience because systemic failures require systemic solutions; this involves correcting failures in development and disaster risk management rather than sustaining them, which requires an understanding of how power is held and used.
• Standard resilience indicators are insufficient for achieving equitable outcomes; practitioners must instead engage with critiques of resilience and explore the politics of social, cultural, and political change to avoid entrenching vulnerability.

APA

Ensor, J., Matin, N., Forrester, J., & Davis, M. (2019). What is equitable resilience? Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/equitable-resilience-discussion-brief-ensor.pdf

Chicago

Ensor, Jonathan, Nilufar Matin, John Forrester, and Marion Davis. What is equitable resilience? Stockholm Environment Institute, 2019. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/equitable-resilience-discussion-brief-ensor.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Ensor |first1=Jonathan |last2=Matin |first2=Nilufar |last3=Forrester |first3=John |last4=Davis |first4=Marion |title=What is equitable resilience? |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=March 2019 |url=https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/equitable-resilience-discussion-brief-ensor.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{ensor2019what, author = {Ensor, Jonathan and Matin, Nilufar and Forrester, John and Davis, Marion}, title = {{What is equitable resilience?}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2019}, month = mar, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/equitable-resilience-discussion-brief-ensor.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }