Community development and related approaches have become prominent in academic circles, resulting in the emergence and resurgence of related community-level notions. With the expansion of terms, conceptual confusions have surfaced. The notion of community resilience has gone through this process, as its development/understanding is still in progress. Community resilience has been misused/confused with other notions including community agency, community vulnerability, community adaptability, and community capacity. Our goal here is to provide conceptual clarification to the term community resilience by reviewing and contrasting it with the above-mentioned notions. We argue that while similitudes exist within these concepts, they are bounded by their literatures fed by different fields of study, resulting in different goals (i.e. problem solving, response to change, and risk mitigation) in varying contexts. Despite their differences, we offer explanations of how the concepts are interrelated, in addition to noting the differences in the levels of conceptualization that each literature offers. We concluded that community resilience provides a better framework for understanding community change and how it is addressed.

Rural migration and its relationship to the rural environment have attracted increasing research interest in recent decades. Rural migration constitutes a key component of human population movement, while rural areas contain most of the world’s natural resources such as land and forests. This study empirically evaluates a conceptual framework incorporating rural household livelihoods as an integrative mediating factor between rural migration and the rural environment in the context of rural-to-urban labor migration in Chongqing Municipality, Southwest China. The analysis draws on data collected through household surveys and key informant interviews from four villages. Results confirm the hypothesis that labor-migrant and non-labor-migrant households differ significantly in livelihood activities including agricultural production, agricultural technology use, income and consumption, and resource use and management. Implications for the subsequent environmental outcomes of rural labor out-migration and corresponding natural resource management and policy in rural origin areas are discussed.