The word ‘resilience’ is often used as if it has a universal meaning, but its definition varies across disciplines and approaches. A broad distinction can be made between its application in psychology, healthcare and organisational development, where it tends to relate to the health and functioning of individuals and groups, and its application in systemic disciplines like disaster management, sustainability science and urban planning, where it tends to largely concern structural or physical entities. Both applications are unpinned by decades of siloed academic work (in fact, further siloes exist between disciplines like psychology and sociology or economics and ecology). 

This rift reflects the fragmented nature of our professional disciplines and knowledge-building institutions, limiting the power of either perspective. The psychological discourse could be more impactful with a systemic lens, whilst societal approaches would benefit from a more holistic view that better integrates inner and outer dimensions of human systems.  

In 2024-25, funded by the Garrison Institute International, a global leader in both psychological resilience programmes and complexity thinking about planetary wellbeing, the Life Itself Sensemaking Studio conducted a programme of research, made recommendations for field building efforts, developed a wiki site and engaged in sector outreach to bring these two worlds closer together.

By conducting interviews with researchers and practitioners, exploring academic literature, popular non-fiction and ‘grey literature’ like policy reports, and documenting leading projects and programmes, we built up a unique picture of an emerging landscape. We found that, following the publication of a groundbreaking book a few years previously, the concept of ‘multisystemic resilience’ was just starting to gain traction and some efforts were being made to break down siloes. However, the topic of societal resilience still largely ignored the rich parallel discourse on psychological resilience and vica-versa. Mental health, for instance, was largely considered in terms of down-stream impacts and minimising the distress caused by disasters, rather than as an upstream condition of community cohesion and coping capacity.

It is hoped that this work will spur further research, collaboration and policy development that foster more ‘multisystemic’, psycho-socially informed impactful approaches to resilience in the context of worsening societal crises.