linking resilience, risk and sustainable development – an inherently normative endeavour per...
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Linking Resilience, Risk and Sustainable Development– An inherently normative endeavour
PER BECKER
Our world is in a precarious state
UncertainComplexAmbiguousDynamic
Resilience
Concepts of resilience
• Not invented by ecologists!• Utilized in various disciplines• Three main approaches
Single-equilibrium approaches
• System has one stable state• ”Bounce back”• Resilience as “resistance to a
disturbance and the speed of return to the equilibrium point”
• Not suitable for systems that explicitly include human beings over time
Multi-equilibrium approaches
• System has several stable states
• Resilience as a measure of robustness or buffering capacity before a disturbance forces a system from one stable equilibrium to another
• Not suitable for systems that explicitly include human beings over time
Complex adaptive systems
• System has no stable state• Resilience as as ability to
adapt in reaction to a disturbance
• Not suitable for systems that explicitly include human beings, as they ignore our ability to anticipate and learn
So what then?
• Focusing explicitly on human-environment systems over time
• Linking the conceptual and the practical, i.e. guiding what to look for in real communities
UncertainComplexAmbiguousDynamic
RiskSystemic
ParticipatoryResilience
Development
Current state
Desired state
Preferred expected scenario
Potential deviation
Risk
Risk scenarios
1. What can happen?2. How likely is that to
happen?3. If it happens, what are
the consequences?
Resilience“the capacity of a human-environment system to continuously develop along a preferred expected trajectory, while remaining within human and environmental boundaries” (Becker 2014)
“the capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds” (SRC 2012)
“an emergent property determined by the ability of the human-environment system to anticipate, recognize, adapt to and learn from…”
Functions for resilience
Capacity to perform functions
Summary
• The world is in a precarious state and resilience has become a central concept
• There are many approaches to resilience, but few are suitable for human-environment systems over time
• The concepts of development and risk are normative and if resilience is to have any meaning in relation to sustainable development it becomes equally normative
• For an approach to resilience to be useful in practice, it must link between the conceptual and the actual, guiding us what to look for and address in real communities and societies
