Resilience Uncovered: A review of professional resilience measurement methodologies

Sammanfattning: Recent policy developments on the global, regional and national levels have materialised strategic goals for building resilience. Implementing resilience fundamentally requires operationalising the concept in order to make it measurable. This thesis scoped for professional resilience measurement methodologies across grey literature and analysed their organisational purposes and specifics of measurement indicators in the light of cohesion and collaborative potential. 55 methodologies from 52 organisations were found. It was concluded that resilience measurements are mainly used for strategic programming and monitoring and evaluation purposes. Overall, the methodologies clearly delineated to six sectoral groups; development/humanitarian, safety/disaster risk management, critical infrastructure/utilities, social welfare, economic and environmental. All of the sectoral groups were conceptually cohesive among their resilience operationalisations. Cross-sectoral cooperation was estimated based on the rates at which disaster risk management, climate change adaptation and complexity were integrated within each sector. Development/humanitarian and safety/disaster risk management sectors both integrated climate change adaptation with a high prevalence. On the other hand, disaster risk management was integrated by safety/disaster risk management and critical infrastructure/utilities sectors with a high prevalence. When it comes to the measurement designs, it was noted that higher scale measurements were more prominent in using secondary data sets than lower scale measurements. Furthermore, it was observed that qualitative measurements were somewhat more common (52.8% of all methodologies) than quantitative measurements (43.8%). The research aim was fulfilled by establishing scientific knowledge on how resilience is operationalised by professional organisations. Based on the resilience operationalisations, resilience seems to be used in a somewhat isolated manner among sectors. While in-sector conceptual cohesion exists, the outcome goals and used concepts vary between sectors. When it comes to inter-organisational cohesion, it was concluded that conceptual heterogeneity exists among most of the identified sectors.