Adapt or transform: what kind of resilience do we want?
For several
In recent weeks, the term "resilience" has been cropping up in numerous political speeches. In this context, a look at scientific publications on this subject can contribute to the debate on our future development.
Raphaël Mathevet, University of Montpellier; Francois Bousquet, CIRAD and Olivier Barreteau, INRAE
In France, this concept was popularized in psychology by Boris Cyrulnik, who defined it as the ability to "resume development after psychological agony." This notion has also been used since the early 1970s following the work of ecologist C.S. Holling in the study of interactions between societies and their environment.
The theory of resilience is based on the complexity of the world, which forces us to live with uncertainty. Applied to a socio-ecological system, it refers to its ability to absorb disturbances of natural origin (fire, drought, disease, etc.) or human origin (logging, market creation, agricultural policy, etc.) and to reorganize itself in order to maintain its functions and structure.
In other words, it is its ability to change while retaining its identity.
According to this theory, times of crisis are opportunities for reorganization, allowing us to choose new paths and then support the process of resilience. These paths result from strategies that will decide between two types of change: adaptation and transformation.
Adaptation refers to a response to stress or disruption (we adapt to something), which does not call into question the fundamental values of the system, which retains its main characteristics. Transformation stems from the realization that the system is no longer viable, whether for socio-economic or ecological reasons, and that it must be changed.
In the context of the current crisis, should we adapt to the new conditions or consider transformation?
Adapting to withstand future crises
Work on resilience focuses on systemic analysis to understand the trajectory and position of the system and to study possible responses to disruptions. Resilience is concerned with the processes that make the system more robust to multiple disruptions.
For their part , vulnerability studies focus more on analyzing the relationship between a given disturbance and a particular object, and attempt to assess the response of that object and its vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability is often seen as equivalent to the "specific resilience" of an object (the resilience of certain parts of the system to one or more types of disruption), as opposed to the "general resilience" of the system (the resilience of each part or of the system as a whole to any type of shock).
Major crises such as the one we are currently experiencing can be an opportunity for states to choose adaptation policies in order to increase their resilience. By focusing on specific risks, the aim is always tacitly to achieve specific resilience.
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Thinking ahead: Reconstruction rather than recovery
These adaptation policies involve implementing or revising preventive protocols that will enable us to better weather the next crises that are sure to come. This includes, for example, setting up financial reserves and stockpiling masks, monitoring emerging diseases, revising insurance systems and emergency protocols, and strengthening food and health self-sufficiency.
This use of the concept of (specific) resilience has been quite successful and can sometimes be exploited to justify individual action and responsibility at the expense of planned, centralized, or shared action and responsibility: citizens would then become entrepreneurs of their own lives and of their system's ability to recover.
With this in mind, it is up to disaster victims and natural resource operators to take charge and organize themselves to withstand the shocks that the uncertain future holds for them.
The proposed solutions appear to be without alternative because they are designed to respond to a specific resilience challenge. The choice of adaptation does not raise the question of fundamental values and therefore fits implicitly within the existing system.
Seven principles for general resilience
The other option is to reason as follows: we know that new crises await us; this invites us to think more broadly about general resilience, to be implemented as soon as possible, and about the fundamental values underlying the management and exploitation of our environments.
Scientists working on the resilience of socioecological systems have drawn seven general principles over the past fifty years.
First, maintain the diversity of genes, species, landscapes, cultural groups, lifestyles, governance rules, and their functional redundancy.
Next, manage connectivity within and between socio-ecological systems. High connectivity between social groups enables information sharing and builds the trust necessary for collective action. While this connectivity can facilitate the rapid spread of epidemics or fake news, it is also part of the solution by promoting mutual aid between distant areas or the recolonization of species from areas spared by a particular disaster.
It is also necessary to manage the slow processes involved in regulating ecosystems or the climate, whether ecological, such as the erosion of biodiversity, or social, such as changes in social values and rules governing access to and use of the environment. When a threshold is crossed, through the interplay of feedback loops, the system is no longer regulated and spirals out of control.
They also call for promoting the concept of complex adaptive systems using interdisciplinary approaches and simulation tools. Resilience also involves encouraging learning and experimentation processes, as well as broadening citizen participation.
Finally, it requires promoting a system of multiple authorities at different levels that are connected to each other. One of the key foundations of this polycentric governance is to match the levels of governance (understood as the exercise of deliberation and decision-making among groups of people who have the authority to act) to those where the problem lies.
The choice of transformation
After weathering the health crisis, what we need now is general resilience. In other words, transformation. This transformation depends on establishing a different relationship between our societies and nature, one based on respect for non-humans and ecological processes, where economic issues no longer take precedence over environmental issues.
Thinking about the world means thinking about the environment we build and that surrounds us. This involves examining the consequences that arise from it: interdependencies, circularities, and co-evolutions. Ecology and the science of complex systems have highlighted our interactions with living things; it is now time to rethink the idea we have of ourselves as human and ecological solidarities.
This transformation still raises many questions, and choosing the right path forward is complex. That is why general resilience cannot be decreed, but must be built.
Who has the legitimacy to make this choice? As Bruno Latour recently suggested, each of us individually and collectively must take stock of what should be preserved or changed.
At what territorial level can this choice be made? Implementing trajectories corresponding to a new social project requires resources and potentially generates effects beyond the people involved in choosing this trajectory.
How can these interactions be taken into account? It is important to remain critical of those who declare a crisis, as well as those who declare or shape the resilience of the system. Resilience is desirable if it is decided upon and implemented within a collective project focusing on relationships between humans, between humans and nature, and within nature itself.
Raphaël Mathevet, Director of Research at the CNRS, Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology, University of Montpellier; Francois Bousquet, Researcher, CIRAD and Olivier Barreteau, Researcher, INRAE
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.