Disaster resilience: a bounce back or bounce forward ability?

The debate on disaster resilience has continued to grow, albeit at a slow pace, since the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction held in Kobe, Hyogo, Japan. One of the most important and striking aspects is that despite the conceptual differences, the resilience and vulnerability paradigms are still locked together and are increasingly being treated as if they are one and the same. The reason for this is not a difficult one. Resilience and vulnerability are viewed as opposite sides of the same coin (Twigg 2007). However, the notion of “bounce back” differentiates resilience from vulnerability. The “bounce back” notion is important to the extent that it liberates resilience from the vulnerability conundrum. Yet, the “bounce back” notion does not seem to acknowledge that disasters are accompanied by change. This paper posits that resilience should be viewed as the ability to “bounce forward” and “move on” following a disaster (Manyena 2009). Three arguments are presented in this paper. First, the “bounce forward” ability conceptualisation of resilience has implications on disaster research and scholarship. It helps us to re-think about the underlying philosophical arguments, particularly those around structure and agency. Secondly, resilience has temporal and continuity elements, which have implications for preand post-disaster planning, including community continuity recovery planning. Lastly, the “bounce forward” conception has psychological implications. It is optimistic, with a potential of assisting disaster victims and service providers to adopt positive behaviour changes prior to and after the disaster.