Social resilience is about social entities and their abilities to tolerate, absorb, cope with and adjust to environmental and social threats of various kinds. The development of the concept of social resilience started with a rather unspecific understanding of social resilience as the capacity to respond, which then evolved to incorporate notions of learning and adaptation to form a composite definition, which includes the acknowledgement of the importance of the roles played by power, politics, and participation in the context of increasing uncertainty and surprise.