Self-care practices among women with gestational diabetes in low-resource settings in Ghana: a phenomenological study.

Complex systems are frequently exposed to a wide range of disruptions. When these systems are responsible for providing critical functions that significantly affect people’s lives, it is crucial that they are capable of effectively dealing with these disruptions. In other words, it is crucial that they are resilient. The conventional view that portrays resilience as a system’s capacity to respond and recover from an isolated disruption is becoming increasingly inadequate in this context. Today’s poly-crises, ranging from COVID-19 to increasing geopolitical conflict and climate change, have exposed the limitations of the existing resilience frameworks and assessment methodologies. Today’s disruptions are unavoidably entangled and interwoven as they co-occur, overlap, and persist over prolonged periods of time. Traditional methods to measure resilience are not able to describe and analyse this complexity. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a method that more accurately captures the dynamic and interdependent nature of the current disruptions. Within the context of continuously evolving and dynamic crises, adaptation emerges as a critical component for understanding resilience and enabling a system to achieve a resilient response. Rooted in the definition of social-ecological resilience, adaptation is defined as the capacity of a system to adjust in response to changing conditions, thus maintaining or even improving its functionality in the face of disruptions. The concept of adaptation focuses on the ability of a system to learn from disruptions and to modify its responses over time. Positioning adaptation as a central component of resilience assessment allows for a deeper understanding of the long-term behavioural dynamics of systems under crisis, which is essential for informing policy development and strategic planning in the context of multiple and overlapping (i.e., poly-)crises.