Adapt or transform: how resilient do we want to be?

For many years

n recent weeks, the term "resilience" has come up in many political speeches. Against this backdrop, a look at the scientific productions devoted to this subject can contribute to the debate on our future development.

Raphaël Mathevet, University of MontpellierFrancois 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 new development after psychic agony". The concept 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 in situations of uncertainty. Applied to a socio-ecological system, it refers to its capacity to absorb disturbances of natural origin (fire, drought, disease, etc.) or human origin (logging, the creation of a market, agricultural policy, etc.) and to reorganize itself in such a way as to maintain its functions and structure.

In other words, its ability to change while retaining its identity.

According to this theory, moments of crisis provide an opportunity for reorganization, enabling us to choose new trajectories to support the resilience process. These trajectories are the result of strategies that choose between two types of change: adaptation and transformation.

Adaptation refers to a reaction to stress or disturbance (i.e., adapting to something), which does not call into question the essential fundamental values of the system, which retains its main characteristics. Transformation stems from the realization that the way the system functions is no longer tenable, whether for socio-economic or ecological reasons, and must be changed.

In the context of the current crisis, should we adapt to new conditions or think about transformation?

Adapting to withstand future crises

Work on resilience focuses on a systemic analysis to understand the trajectory and position of the system, and to study possible responses to disturbances. Resilience is concerned with the processes that make a system more robust to multiple disturbances.

For their part, work on vulnerability focuses more on analyzing the relationship between a given disturbance and a particular object, and attempts to assess the response of this object, its fragilities.

Vulnerability often appears as the equivalent of the "specific resilience" of an object (the resilience of certain parts of the system to one or more types of disturbance), as opposed to the "general resilience" of the system (the resilience of each part or the whole of a system to any type of shock).

Major crises such as the one we are currently experiencing can be an opportunity for states to opt for adaptation policies, in order to increase their resilience. As these policies focus on specific risks, they are always tacitly about specific resilience.

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These adaptation policies involve setting up or revising preventive protocols that will enable us to better weather future crises. This involves, for example, setting up financial and mask reserves, monitoring emerging diseases, revising insurance systems and emergency protocols, and strengthening food and health autonomy.

This use of the notion of (specific) resilience has met with some success and can sometimes be instrumentalized to justify individual action and responsibility at the expense of planned, centralized or shared action and responsibility: citizens would then become the entrepreneurs of their lives and of their system's ability to recover.

From this point of view, it's up to the victims of disasters or the users of natural resources to take charge and organize themselves to withstand the shocks that the uncertain future holds in store for them.

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The proposed solutions appear to have no alternative, as they are designed to meet a specific resilience challenge. The choice of adaptation does not raise the question of fundamental values, and is therefore an implicit continuation of 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 a general resilience to be engaged as soon as possible, about the fundamental values underlying the management and operation of our environments.

Scientists working on the resilience of social-ecological systems have derived seven general principles over the last fifty years.

Firstly, to maintain the diversity of genes, species, landscapes, cultural groups, lifestyles, rules of governance and their functional redundancy.

Secondly, to manage connectivity within and outside social-ecological systems. A high level of connectivity between social groups enables information to be shared, and the trust necessary for collective action to develop. While this connectivity can encourage the rapid spread of an epidemic or fake news, it is also part of the solution, promoting mutual aid between distant zones, or the recolonization of species from areas spared by some plague.

We also need to manage the slow processes involved in regulating ecosystems and 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, the system is no longer regulated by the interplay of feedbacks, and spirals out of control.

They also call for the promotion of complex adaptive systems thinking with interdisciplinary approaches and simulation tools. Resilience also implies encouraging learning and experimentation processes, as well as broadening citizen participation.

Finally, it requires promoting a system of multiple, interconnected authorities at different levels. 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 is located.

The choice of transformation

After resisting the health crisis, what we need is general resilience. In other words, a transformation. This is based on the establishment of a different relationship between our societies and nature, founded on respect for non-humans and ecological processes, where economic issues no longer take precedence over environmental ones.

Thinking about the world means thinking about the environment we build and which encompasses us. This means examining the consequences that flow from it: interdependence, circularity and co-evolution. Ecology and the science of complex systems have highlighted our interactions with the living world; now it's time to rethink our idea of ourselves and of human and ecological solidarity.

This transformation still raises many questions, and the choice of appropriate trajectories is complex, which is why general resilience cannot be decreed but must be built.

Who has the legitimacy to make this choice? As Bruno Latour recently suggested, we need to take stock, individually and collectively, of what needs to be preserved or modified.

At what territorial scale can this choice be made? The implementation of trajectories corresponding to a new project for society requires resources and potentially generates effects beyond the people involved in the choice of this trajectory.

How can we take these interactions into account? We need to be as critical of those who declare a crisis as we are of those who declare or shape a system's resilience. The latter is desirable if it is decided and implemented within a collective project on relations between humans, between themselves and with regard to nature.

Raphaël Mathevet, CNRS Research Director, Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology, University of MontpellierFrancois Bousquet, Researcher, CIRAD and Olivier Barreteau, Researcher, Inrae

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.