Learning from resilience research: findings from four projects in New Zealand

This paper interrogates four case studies against a resilience framework developed in the course of a research programme. A resilience framework provided the necessary structure to generalise across the case studies and begin to extract lessons from the research. By utilising the framework it is possible to benchmark resilience traits, measure progress or decline, articulate the need for diversity and the balancing of priorities, and provide a more holistic guide for policy-makers. The four case study projects are presented before a discussion links the main findings from the cases to the resilience framework. By applying a theoretical framework to diverse pieces of work, the paper demonstrates an approach to learning systematically from complex and multi-disciplinary research. In particular, the framework captures how the scope of projects expanded over time to incorporate additional dimensions of resilience. This finding highlights the need for flexibility in multi-disciplinary research projects to allow for the inclusion of dimensions that emerge as important in the course of the research.