Knowledge Structures and Components of Rural Resilience in the 2010s: Conceptual Development and Implications

Abstract

Resilience is being widely adopted as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding sustainability dynamics, despite the conceptual challenges in developing proxies and indicators for researchers and policy makers. In our study, we observed how the concept of resilience undergoes continued extension within the rural resilience literature. We comprehensively reviewed rural resilience literature using keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) analysis and a systematic review of shortlisted papers. We conducted the KCN analysis for 1186 papers to characterize the state of the rural resilience literature, and systematically reviewed 36 shortlisted papers to further examine how rural resilience analysis and its assessment tools are helping understand the complexity and interdependence of rural social-ecological systems, over three three-year periods from 2010 to 2018. The results show that the knowledge structure built by the high frequency of co-occurrence keywords remains similar over the three-year periods, including climate change, resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, and management, whereas the components of knowledge have greatly expanded, indicating an increased understanding of rural system dynamics. Through the systematic review, we found that developing resilience assessment tools is often designed as a process to strengthen adaptive capacity at the household or community level in response to global processes of climate change and economic globalization. Furthermore, community resilience is found to be an interesting knowledge component that has characterized rural resilience literature in the 2010s. Based on our study, we summarized conceptual characteristics of rural resilience and discussed the challenges and implications for researchers and policy makers.