The rise of resilience: Evolution of a new concept in coastal planning in Ireland and the US

Interest in the concept of resilience has grown significantly in recent years. The perceived strengths of resilience as a concept stem from its foundations in the sciences and humanities, and have recently gained currency amongst political actors and in policy spheres. This papers objective is to investigate the value of resilience as a concept when applied to the process of coastal climate change adaptation with a focus on place specificity. As applied to coastal hazards and climate change adaptation, we expect that resilience encompasses more system complexities than a traditional vulnerability or hazards approach. Our aim in this paper is achieved through carrying out a critical analysis of Irish and US academic and policy literature and determining if, and to what degree, one or more of the three selected lenses of psychological, engineering and ecological resilience are applied. Through contrasting the evolution of coastal adaptation policy developments in both Ireland and the U.S. the paper highlights the importance of policy, environment and geography in the area of coastal management. It furthermore examines the question of whether the concept of resilience represents a paradigm shift, or whether it maintains the dominant anthropological perspective of earlier hazard mitigation approaches under new guise. The increasing focus on climate adaptation as more than enhanced hazard mitigation exemplifies that shift. In the U.S. proposals for large-scale retreat programs post-Sandy are further evidence that combined ecological-anthropological approaches are gaining traction, though planning actions taken and factors considered continue to be dominated by parochialism and anthropocentric or psychological definitions of resilience. In Ireland there is a noticeable increase in the ecological resilience grounded practices of adaptive management and co-management in relation to coastal planning. The fostering of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) frameworks as well as a clear linking between climate adaption and the management of coastal regions underlines this development. Results indicate that resilience, under the three forms explored, is a concept that has recently increased in popularity. Simultaneously, there has been a discernible shift in the direction of broader inclusion of concerns about human environment interactions, but the two are not necessarily coextensive, and concepts of resilience do not always encompass these concerns. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.