"Resilience Thinking": A Conceptual Framework for Sustainability?

"Resilience thinking" puts resilience, which is defined as the ability of a social-ecological system to maintain its basic function and structure in the face of shocks, at the center of sustainability. It argues that a social-ecological system is vulnerable to changes if it is not resilient, and therefore, building resilience of such systems is the key to achieving sustainability. There are two major lines of resilience thinking: thresholds and adaptive cycles. According to resilience thinking, there is usually no single equilibrium for a social-ecological system. A few key state variables exist in a social-ecological system, and if the thresholds of these variables are passed, the system will experience regime transition. A ball-in-a-basin model used to illustrate the potential states and transitions. Resilience thinking also describes the evolution of a social-ecological system as adaptive cycles, which are comprised of different phases: rapid growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. Rapid growth and conservation form the fore loop of the adaptive cycle while release and reorganization are referred as the back loop.

The contributions of resilience thinking are that it looks at a social-ecological system as a complex adaptive system undergoing constant changes, recognizes the feedbacks and interactions between the social system and the ecological system, and studies them in a linked manner. The concept of thresholds is useful for managing such systems through monitoring key state variables to prevent them from going through undesirable regime transitions. Understanding adaptive cycles can be helpful in determining how and when to intervene so that the management is more effective. However, resilience thinking is not a coherent conceptual framework for sustainability and its usefulness is limited by its narrow focus.

            First, the concept of resilience does not capture the essence of sustainability, and building resilience may help but is not the key to achieving sustainability. Sustainability is usually understood as supporting current and future human lives at a certain standard while maintaining resources and ecosystem functions. There are two points here: (i) humans need to achieve a certain level of well-being and maintain it, and (ii) ecosystem functions and resources need to be maintained. Both are for the long term. It is clear that building resilience will not help either of them when humans still have low level of well-being or/and the environment is bad. Only if a system is in a desirable state (Humans have achieved a certain level of well-being and the ecological system is healthy), resilience becomes a desirable property and building resilience will help sustain the desirable state.

            Second, the two lines of resilience thinking do not come together, and can not constitute a coherent framework. Thresholds and adaptive cycles are two distinctive ways of looking at a system. Adaptive cycles are more about the development pathway of a system. The basin of attraction and thresholds are an abstraction of states and state transitions of a system. The concept of resilience is supposed to link the two lines of thinking into a coherent framework, but it does not do so. In fact, it is not very clear how adaptive cycles are related to resilience. Does understanding adaptive cycles help resilience building? Does building resilience help shaping the adaptive cycles? There are no straight answers to these questions.

            Third, the concepts of resilience, adaptive cycles, and basin of attractions originated from ecological systems (or even much earlier from physical dynamic systems), how appropriately they can be applied to social-ecological systems as a whole is a question. Although the social system and the ecological system are tightly coupled by interactions and feedbacks, they do not change in a well synchronized way or at the same time steps. For example, the ecological system may follow adaptive cycles and the social system may also follow adaptive cycles, but it seems rarely that they would follow the same cycles.                         

            Fourth, many aspects of resilience thinking are loosely developed or defined, and many assertions are partially true or only hold in some cases. For instance, the basin of attraction is more of a metaphor, and resilience thinking does not tell us how to come up with the basin of attraction of a system. The idea of adaptive cycles is more philosophical than scientific. Is it universally true that systems go through adaptive cycles? How can we tell which phase of the adaptive cycle a system is in at a given time? To what degree does it hold that resilience declines in conservation phase? For example, if a mature terrestrial ecosystem is considered in its conservation stage, all the species have adapted well to other species and the environment (including disturbances), and the system is actually resilient. Is lower connectedness always associated with more flexibility, hence, higher resilience, and higher connectedness with less flexibility, hence lower resilience? Resilience thinking also constantly portrays efficiency as the extreme opposite of resilience without providing specific contexts.  Efficiency does not necessarily lead to the loss of redundancy, and redundancy is not equivalent to resilience. Again, mature terrestrial ecosystems are good examples. More efficient ways of using constrained resources is in fact critical for sustainability.

            Finally, the idea of sustainability came from the recognition of the enormous environmental problems humanities face, but resilience thinking is not really helpful for solving these problems. The challenge is that most of the social-ecological systems are in an undesirable state (Either the ecological system or both the human and ecological systems are in bad conditions). Resilience thinking does not provide insights or solutions to how to transform a system from an undesirable state to a desirable state although it is useful for sustaining the desirable state of a social-ecological system.

Therefore, resilience thinking is better evaluated as a school of interesting thoughts than a coherent framework. It captures one part of the dynamic picture of sustainability, but not the essential part. It is useful, but not the key to sustainability. The ultimate goal of managing social-ecological systems is to achieve sustainability. Building resilience can be helpful, but it is not the most important. Indeed, it will be more fruitful if we go back to where resilience thinking came from: complex adaptive systems. Instead of focusing narrowly on resilience, examining human economic activities, their impacts on the ecological system, and feedbacks between the ecological system and the social system over time is more important for achieving sustainability.  A broader framework is needed of which the concept of resilience can be a part.

Reference

Brian Walker and David Salt 2006, Resilience Thinking, Island Press

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