A systematic review on concept connotation and analytical framework of livelihood resilience

At present, resilience research is a hot area of sustainability science research, and livelihood resilience analysis is an effective analytical tool to solve the impact of regional or individual household livelihoods. Based on the systematic review of the research literature on livelihood resilience at home and abroad, this study combs the concept connotation, analysis framework and evaluation method of livelihood resilience. The study found that: 1) Livelihood resilience is a key support for people and their initiative to resist disturbances and achieve recovery and sustainable development when dealing with the impact of livelihood systems. Its conceptual connotation can be divided based on 4 perspectives: process, capability, strategy and transformation. 2) The theme of livelihood resilience research presents a ‘progressive’ development, from external climate change to the awareness of natural disaster response, and then to human disturbance factors and emphasizing human subjective initiative; the scale shows a global and multi-scale trend, and the construction of the index system of research content tends to be more subjective and objective. However, there are still limitations such as conceptual generalization, ignoring the transformation of livelihood strategies and long-term changes in livelihoods. 3) According to the dominant interference factors and the evolution of research topics, the analytical framework and evaluation models in the field of livelihood resilience research can be divided into 3 types: ‘climate change type’ ‘natural disaster type’ and ‘human disturbance type’. Climate change type livelihood resilience connects climate adaptation and livelihood security, and serves long-term climate adaptation policies; quantitative assessment of emergency response and short-term recovery capability of natural disaster-type focus on sudden disasters; the human disturbance type focuses on the interaction between human initiative and social structure, and the subdivision dimensions such as resource utilization and knowledge learning are more suitable for the social and economic scene. In the future, we should gradually build a systematic category-based livelihood resilience analysis framework, strengthen the comparative analysis of research objects and multi-case application research, pay attention to the multi-scale trade-off and spatio-temporal dynamics of livelihood resilience assessment, and explore the long-term dynamic characteristics of livelihood and livelihood strategies.