http://www.resalliance.org/564.php

The general meaning of resilience, derived from its Latin roots 'to jump or leap back', is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

In the Resilience Alliance we put more emphasis on the capacity to "get back" than to "bounce back". Our focus is social-ecological systems - linked systems of people and nature. It involves resilience at multiple scales, from the scale of a farm or village, through communities, regions, and nations to the globe. By "social-ecological system" we mean a multi-scale pattern of resource use around which humans have organized themselves in a particular social structure (distribution of people, resource management, consumption patterns, and associated norms and rules).

Resilience is...
the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organise and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning). It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks. As resilience declines the magnitude of a shock from which it cannot recover gets smaller and smaller. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility. Growth and efficiency alone can often lead ecological systems, businesses and societies into fragile rigidities, exposing them to turbulent transformation. Learning, recovery and flexibility open eyes to novelty and new worlds of opportunity.

The aim of resilience management and governance is...
either, to keep the system within a particular configuration of states (system 'regime') that will continue to deliver desired ecosystem goods and services (preventing the system from moving into an un-desirable regime from which it is either difficult or impossible to recover) or, to move from a less desirable to a more desirable regime.

The basic concepts underpinning a resilience approach to policy and management are: non-linearity, alternate regimes and thresholds; adaptive cycles; multiple scales and cross-scale effects - "panarchy"; adaptability; transformability; general versus specified resilience.