The concept of resilience has become increasingly popular over the past years – especially in sustainability science. As of late 2020, there were almost 13,000 peer-reviewed publications in the Scopus scientific database that mentioned both resilience and sustainability. However, the definitions of resilience vary greatly. In their recent paper, Nüchter et al. (2021) investigate how the concept of resilience has been used in peer-reviewed empirical sustainability science articles that were published from 2014 to 2018. More specifically, the authors seek to provide an overview of the current research landscape of empirical resilience research in sustainability science and to contribute to the discussion on the potential of resilience as a boundary object. To this end, they combine an inductive text analysis with a multivariate statistical full-text analysis of 112 journal articles.

The qualitative content analysis revealed that a social-ecological resilience understanding was most popular in sustainability science literature: while one third…