“Resilience is the ability of a community to withstand, respond to and recover from a wide range of harmful and adverse events.”
Biology
Resilience is a concept to measure the ability of an individual or a population to survive in spite of adverse conditions. The more extreme the conditions are under which a population can survive, the more resilient it is.
Sociology
Resilient communities have the ability to survive crime sprees, natural disasters, conflict, intra- or inter-group tensions etc without collapsing.
Communities with intact social fabric, social interaction and lawful governance are more resilient.
Those that are able to bounce back to their condition in the pre-crisis period, or even improve their situation, may be considered resilient, while those that are collapsing or are recovering but are worse off than previously may not be resilient.
To measure resilience and the impact of interventions on resilience, baseline information must be established.