Transformational resilience is at the forefront of academic and policy initiatives on sustainable development, climate adaptation, and disaster risk reduction as a result of successive and complex changes in global dynamics. While the literature on transformative resilience is growing, there is no comprehensive analysis of its trends and development. This paper aims to close this knowledge gap by presenting a multifaceted bibliometric overview of transformative resilience literature, revealing its trends, focus areas, transitions, and intellectual foundations. This is based on 415 Web of Science-indexed articles published between 1996 and 2021. According to the findings, the concept has developed primarily around four key presentive domains: vulnerability and climate change adaptation, urban and regional disaster resilience, sustainability management and institutional transformation, and COVID-19. While priorities and subjects of research have evolved over time, key concepts such as resilience, adaptation, and climate change have recurred. Influential authors and documents from three interrelated resilience schools, including sustainable development, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction, have shaped the field’s intellectual foundations. We contend that a greater variety of contexts is required to facilitate transformative resilience’s investigation, description, and experimentation.

The objective of this study is to develop a framework for guiding place resilience, encompassing a holistic conception of resilience that includes coping, adaptive, and transformative capacities. The framework aims to challenge unequal patterns of development and highlight the potential for resilience, sustainability, and transformation in the face of multiple stressors, shifting the focus from reactive measures to proactive innovations. To achieve this, an inductive content analysis was conducted to introduce the multidimensional aspects and qualities of resilient places. Subsequently, a framework is presented that incorporates the elements, dynamics, and interactions among various factors contributing to the resilience of place.

Local governments are increasingly navigating accelerating change and escalating complexity caused by interconnected crises, commonly referred to as a global polycrisis. These crises, including climate change, lack of affordable housing, declining mental health, and geopolitical instability, both shape and are shaped by local conditions. Cities face growing pressure to equitably provide services that are responsive to evolving community needs while contending with the systemic nature of contemporary challenges. However, local governments are often constrained by conventional management frameworks and practices that do not match the complexity of today’s challenges. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore how systems science can be leveraged to define and characterize a transformative new type of management designed to enable local governments to more adequately address emerging complexity. To this end, the authors review the literature on contemporary management practice and explore how management for local government can be reframed in alignment with the insights from systems science, using a service ecosystem lens. The findings point to a needed shift toward systemic management practices that are integrative, collective, and adaptive. The authors illustrate the practical relevance of these three characteristics and conclude with recommendations for research, policy, and practice aimed at building the institutional capabilities required to transition toward systemic management frameworks and practices that match the complexity of the polycrisis.

Cities house most of the global population and generate the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving a 1.5 °C pathway depends on how city data is created, governed, and trusted. Building on the updated Global Research and Action Agenda (GRAA) and insights from the 2021 and 2024 Innovate4Cities conferences, this chapter shows how digitalization tools such as AI, IoT, and digital twins can shift practice from compliance reporting to opportunity-focused, equity-centered action. We trace the evolution of city knowledge systems, identify technical, institutional, and ethical bottlenecks through the eight GRAA towers, and illustrate emerging solutions with three cases (ClimateView, CityCatalyst in Brazil’s CHAMP pilot, and DUCTExplorer). A systems perspective links open standards, participatory data, and ethics-by-design to finance-ready portfolios. We conclude with a 12-step action plan to turn fragmented data into a trustworthy foundation for faster, fairer urban climate action.

The concept of community disaster resilience is an increasingly important discourse on environmental changes and has been under debate on international academic and policy circles over the past decade. While conceptualizing disaster resilience is increasingly seen as a significant and requisite undertaking in hazard mitigation, reduction, and planning, there exist only a few number of frameworks in the literature presenting systematic methodology and guideline for empirical measurement of the concept. In addition, the question of whether such a measurement can adequately address the ongoing or emerging needs of local stakeholders and governments remains in agenda. To tackle this challenge, this study first intends to synthesis the needs of local stakeholders in community resilience measurement to serve both as a shared vison of resilience measurement missions and as a basis for developing a technical procedure for operationalizing community disaster resilience. Next, based on the defined needs, we propose a synthesized procedure that highlights how the needs of local stakeholders can be translated in measurement process. Finally, the developed framework is applied in order to perform a quality assessment of the 10 most well-known and related measurement frameworks. This synthesized approach, therefore, can bridge the gap between the visions and actions in resilience measurement and provide a measurement that is need-based, proactive rather than reactive, and action-oriented. Furthermore, it can predispose local stakeholders, leaders, and planners to prioritize those actions that are needed more to build and sustain resilience. The quality assessment demonstrates in-depth information regarding the characteristics of each measurement framework, which can be used to identify weaknesses and limitations of current disaster resilience measures and to improve them where needed, in order to meet the risk preparation and planning needs of stakeholders, decision makers, and urban planners.