The term “resilience” comes from Latin resilere, “to spring back, start back, rebound, recoil, retreat”, and is often intended and defined as the ability to cope with or recover from change. Resilience is defined as: “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Brian Walker). Resilience corresponds to the Aristotelian concept of entelechy “exercising activity in order to guarantee one’s identity”. Resilience shows the boundaries to sustainability. It shows what type of systems are able to survive a long time of low/medium stress or a short duration of high stress. The resilience of a system is influenced by the level of outside disorder the system has to cope with and the internal state of the system itself.
Read more (much more) at: http://hans.wyrdweb.eu/about-resilience/