Towards a Theory of Multisystemic Responsibility and Experienced Adversity

Abstract

Resilience is increasingly understood as a multisystemic process shaped by relationships, institutions and wider social and environmental structures. Yet the responsibilities required to operationalise resilience have rarely been theorised in similarly multisystemic terms. This conceptual paper argues that resilience and responsibility are co-produced across systems and proposes four forms of responsibility: protective, supportive, responsive and structural. We suggest that responsibilities should be distributed according to actors’ power and capacity to influence children and young people’s lives. We also reconceptualise adversity as emerging through the interaction of exposure, lived experience and responsibility, with nervous-system regulation offering one mechanism through which these processes become embodied. We argue that resilience discourse can displace responsibility when young people are expected to adapt to harms that more powerful actors could prevent or reduce. Resilience research must therefore ask not only how young people adapt, but who is responsible for the conditions requiring adaptation.