Resilience plans in the US: an evaluation

Resilience is a framework that drives cities’ responses to climate change, evidenced by the increasing number of resilience plans that cities have adopted. Resilience plans can offer insights on how cities conceptualize resilience. We undertake a content analysis of 38 resilience plans of US cities to understand how they define resilience, conceptualize goals and implementation strategies, involve the public in their formulation, and address equity issues. We find that equity manifests in explicit and implicit ways throughout the plans but is rarely operationalized. Cities gather many social, environmental, physical and economic goals under the term resilience, which may imply a recognition of the complexity of urban systems but renders those goals ineffective. The majority of resilience plans advocate a quick return to a previous state in the face of a disturbance, forgoing the opportunity to take on the more transformative potential of the term towards a more equitable future.

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management