Adapt or Transform: What Kind of Resilience Do We Want?
For several
In recent weeks, the term “resilience” has been cropping up in many political discourses. In this context, a look at the scientific literature on this topic can contribute to the debate on our future development.
Raphaël Mathevet, University of Montpellier; François 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 distress.” 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. When applied to a socio-ecological system, it refers to the system’s ability to absorb disturbances of natural origin (such as a fire, a drought, or a disease) or human origin (such as logging, the creation of a market, or an agricultural policy) 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 provide an opportunity for reorganization that allows us to choose new paths and then support the process of resilience. These paths result from strategies that will distinguish between two types of change: adaptation and transformation.
Adaptation refers to a response to stress or disruption (adapting to something) that does not call into question the system’s core values, as the system retains its key characteristics. Transformation stems from the realization that the system’s current functioning is no longer sustainable—whether for socioeconomic 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 a transformation?
Adapting to Weather Future Crises
Research on resilience focuses on a systems analysis to understand the system’s trajectory and state and to explore possible responses to disturbances. Resilience examines the processes that make a system more robust in the face of multiple disturbances.
For their part, research on vulnerability focuses more on analyzing the relationships between a given disturbance and a specific object, and seeks to assess that object’s response and its vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability is often seen as equivalent to an object’s “specific resilience” (the resilience of certain parts of the system in the face of one or more types of disturbances), as opposed to the system’s “general resilience” (the resilience of each part or the system as a whole to any type of shock).
Major crises such as the one we are currently experiencing can provide an opportunity for governments to adopt adaptation policies in order to increase their resilience. By focusing on specific risks, the discussion always tacitly refers to specific resilience.
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These adaptation policies involve establishing or revising preventive protocols that will enable us to better weather the next crises, which are bound to occur. This includes, for example, building up financial and mask reserves, monitoring emerging diseases, revising insurance systems and emergency protocols, and strengthening food and health self-sufficiency.
This (specific) use of the concept of resilience has gained some traction 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 the architects of their own lives and of their system’s ability to bounce back.
With this in mind, it is up to disaster victims and those who exploit natural resources to take matters into their own hands and organize themselves to weather the shocks that an uncertain future may hold for them.
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The proposed solutions appear to have no alternatives because they are designed to address a specific resilience challenge. The choice to adapt does not call into question fundamental values and thus represents 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 lie ahead; this calls for a broader reflection on building overall resilience as soon as possible, and on the fundamental values underlying the management and use of our environments.
Over the past fifty years, scientists studying the resilience of socio-ecological systems have identified seven general principles.
First, maintain the diversity of genes, species, landscapes, cultural groups, lifestyles, and governance systems, as well as their functional redundancy.
Next, manage connectivity within and between socio-ecological systems. High connectivity among social groups enables the sharing of information and fosters the trust necessary for collective action. While this connectivity can facilitate the rapid spread of an epidemic 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.
We must also manage the slow processes involved in regulating ecosystems or the climate, whether they are ecological—such as the erosion of biodiversity—or social—such as changes in values and social norms governing access to and use of the environment. Once a threshold is crossed, feedback loops cause the system to become unregulated and spiral out of control.
They also call for promoting the concept of complex adaptive systems through interdisciplinary approaches and simulation tools. Resilience also involves encouraging learning and experimentation, as well as broadening citizen participation.
Finally, it calls for promoting a system of multiple, interconnected authorities at different levels. One of the key principles of this polycentric governance is to align the levels of governance (understood as the process of deliberation and decision-making among groups of people who have the authority to act) with the levels at which the problem arises.
The Choice to Transform
After weathering the health crisis, what we need now is overall resilience. In other words, transformation. This transformation depends on establishing a different relationship between our societies and nature—one based on respect for non-human beings and ecological processes—where economic concerns no longer take precedence over environmental ones.
To think about the world is to think about the environment we are building and that surrounds us. This means examining the consequences that arise from it: interdependencies, circularities, and co-evolution. Ecology and the science of complex systems have helped highlight our interactions with living things; it is now time to rethink our conception of ourselves in terms of human and ecological solidarity.
This transformation still raises many questions, and choosing the right paths forward is complex; this is precisely why overall resilience cannot be decreed but must be built.
Who has the authority to make this choice? As Bruno Latour recently suggested, each of us—and collectively—must take stock of what should be preserved or changed.
At what geographical level can this choice be made? Implementing pathways that align with a new vision for society requires resources and may have effects that extend beyond the people involved in choosing that pathway.
How can we take these interactions into account? We must remain critical of those who declare a crisis, just as we must be critical of those who declare or shape the system’s resilience. Resilience is desirable if it is decided upon and implemented as part of a collective project addressing relationships among humans, between humans and nature, and regarding nature itself.
Raphaël Mathevet, Research Director at the CNRS, Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology, University of Montpellier; François Bousquet, Researcher, CIRAD and Olivier Barreteau, Researcher, INRAE
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.