While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for reforming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosystem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clarifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience.

中文翻译：

---

理解弹性

虽然复原力是发展、气候适应和相关领域的一个主要概念，但对于如何解释这个术语、它与紧密重叠的术语的关系或其规范性，仍然存在许多疑问。一个主要观点是，虽然复原力最初是一个描述性概念，表示生态系统的某些适应性属性，但随后将其应用于社会环境，将其定义为变革性和规范性的品质，从而扭曲了其意义和目的。本文基于对 CS Holling 关于弹性的原始工作的审查，提出了另一种哲学解释。我们表明，复原力在霍林关于改革环境科学和管理的建议中起着核心作用，并且霍林将复原力定义为生态系统吸收变化并利用它来适应或进化的能力，但也作为维持和机会性地利用这种自然能力的社会能力。因此，复原力表现为一种变革性的社会生态属性，它在三个方面具有规范性：作为内在的生态价值、作为组织或管理风格的美德，以及作为对人与自然关系的良性理解。这种解释说明了弹性的实际相关性，阐明了弹性与相关术语之间的关系，并为进一步规范弹性工作奠定了坚实的基础。并作为对人与自然关系的良性理解。这种解释说明了弹性的实际相关性，阐明了弹性与相关术语之间的关系，并为进一步规范弹性工作奠定了坚实的基础。并作为对人与自然关系的良性理解。这种解释说明了弹性的实际相关性，阐明了弹性与相关术语之间的关系，并为进一步规范弹性工作奠定了坚实的基础。