An Agenda to Advance Integrative Resilience Research and Practice: Key Themes From a Resilience Roundtable, Executive Summary

P eople are facing an increasing variety and number of stressors. The nature of these stressors ranges from interpersonal and financial difficulties to environmental hazards and societal forces, affecting individuals, institutions, and communities. Extensive research has focused on the healthiest and most effective ways that people and communities respond to and recover from stress. Yet while the science of resilience has expanded greatly since the year 2000, many gaps remain. Resilience is defined as the capacity of any dynamic system to anticipate and adapt successfully to difficulties. Individual resilience is the process of, capacity for, or outcome of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. While resilience science has advanced greatly in terms of understanding the factors that promote individual as well as community resilience, there is increasing recognition of the need for transdisciplinary research* (among disciplines such as psychology, To ensure that transdisciplinary resilience research has the strongest impact, several challenges must be overcome. First, as the field advances, confusion grows about what it encompasses, its scope and intent. Second, even when definitions are clear, communities struggle with how to translate resilience frameworks into actions for change in communities. Third, measurement continues to evolve, but efforts to integrate indicators * " Transdisciplinary research is defined as research efforts conducted by investigators from different disciplines working jointly to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem. " 3 of the various types of impacts into a useful metric lag behind. What is needed is a shared agenda, going forward, that will promote research in resilience in a way that builds across disciplines. Approximately 80 leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers met in June 2016, to explore opportunities for a future resilience agenda. A primary focus was on how to integrate progress in parallel streams of individual and community resilience research and implementation activity. The meeting also sought to identify enduring questions which need to be answered in order to further advance the field and successfully implement resilience concepts. Prior to the meeting, the organizers prepared a discussion paper, based on a literature review and current practices, that was then shared with the meeting participants. Among the information included in the paper were a set of four topics proposed as the focal points of the agenda: acute and chronic stress; systems orientation; …