Resilience, Development and Global Change

Katrina Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134614189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Resilience is currently infusing policy debates and public discourses, widely promoted as a normative goal in fields as diverse as the economy, national security, personal development and well-being. Resilience thinking provides a framework for understanding dynamics of complex, inter-connected social, ecological and economic systems. The book critically analyzes the multiple meanings and applications of resilience ideas in contemporary society and to suggests where, how and why resilience might cause us to re-think global change and development, and how this new approach might be operationalized.

The book shows how current policy discourses on resilience promote business-as-usual rather than radical responses to change. But it argues that resilience can help understand and respond to the challenges of the contemporary age. These challenges are characterized by high uncertainty; globalized and interconnected systems; increasing disparities and limited choices. Resilience thinking can overturn orthodox approaches to international development dominated by modernization, aid dependency and a focus on economic growth and to global environmental change – characterized by technocratic approaches, market environmentalism and commoditization of ecosystem services.

Resilience, Development and Global Change presents a sophisticated, theoretically informed synthesis of resilience thinking across disciplines. It applies resilience ideas specifically to international development and relates resilience to core theories in development and shows how a radical, resilience-based approach to development might transform responses to climate change, to the dilemmas of managing forests and ecosystems, and to rural and urban poverty in the developing world. The book provides fresh perspectives for scholars of international development, environmental studies and geography and add new dimensions for those studying broader fields of ecology and society.

1
Resilience now

Resilience has recently been described as a theory of change, a new development paradigm, a defining metaphor for our era, and a buzzword. Clearly the term and the concepts around it have significant resonance and the traction for current thinking and policy on global change, development and environment. The concepts of resilience, development and transformation are the central subjects of this book. This chapter sets out the key arguments and justification for the book, and discusses some of the contemporary framings of resilience. This situates resilience very firmly in a transdisciplinary arena addressing the urgent need for a new set of guiding principles and concepts to inform international development in the age of perceived rapid and large-scale global changes. It presents a number of definitions of resilience and related concepts, and some of the main critiques of resilience science and the policy prescriptions that flow from it. It shows why a political ecology approach – which examines the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes – gives rise to a constructive engagement with, and opens new avenues for, resilience.

Why resilience, why now?

Resilience has become increasingly prevalent in both scientific and policy realms and in public discourse. Resilience, it seems, is everywhere, highly prominent in both scientific and popular debates. In the wake of any sudden event or disaster, there are inevitably calls for increased resilience or narratives about how resilient people and communities, ecosystems or cities – even the ‘economy’ – are in the face of a shock or calamity. Table 1.1 shows recent examples of these proclamations in the media about resilience in different contexts from various arenas of public life. This rise in the resilience has taken place particularly in the last decade and especially since the global financial crisis in 2007–8. Recent analyses show continued and steady rise in the popularity of the term, for example as a search term on Google, and in terms of published scientific articles (Baggio et al. 2015; Xu & Marinova 2013). Resilience is being promoted not just in relation to how people can respond to catastrophic or extreme events – ‘shocks’ to the system – but also to describe proactive adaptation and anticipatory action. In this way, resilience is understood not only as a response to change, but also as a strategy for building the capacity to deal with and to shape change. In this book I explore some of these different applications of resilience terminology and ideas, and focus specifically on international development, mainly – though not exclusively – in developing countries, and chiefly in the context of environmental and climate change. Development is understood here to mean the process of cultural, demographic, economic, political and social change, with a particular focus on the reduction or elimination of poverty in poor countries.

Table 1.1 Resilience in public discourse

Event	Quote
Pakistan floods, 2011	‘The People of Pakistan have shown remarkable strength and resilience throughout the disaster, supporting each other to overcome extraordinary adversity.’
	Rauf Engin Soysal, Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General for Assistance to Pakistan
Financial crisis, 2011	‘We can’t hope to prevent financial crises from happening, but we can build institutions that help to ensure that our financial system is more resilient in the future.’
	Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, on preventing financial crises
World Economic Forum, 2013	‘Dynamism in our hyper-connected world requires increasing our resilience to the many global risks that loom before us.’
	Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum
Hurricane Sandy, 2013	‘… even as we continue to work with those communities today, it is valuable to assess the lessons learned from this natural disaster so that we can rebuild stronger, more resilient communities that are better prepared for any future extreme weather.’
	Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, US Department of Energy
US National Disaster Resilience Competition, 2014	‘President Announces $1 Billion Climate “Resilience” Fund to Help Communities Prepare for Natural Disasters.’
	International Business Times

Source: Author’s own

The discussion covers how resilience is increasingly applied in both scientific and public discourse. In this chapter I discuss how resilience has many different meanings, interpretations and applications. But as the applications and prominence of resilience increase, so does the need to understand its diverse framings, narratives and discourses (Leach 2008). The aims of the book are to make sense of these diverse meanings and synthesise key issues, and to distil the novel aspects of resilience that could inform a new approach to understanding, managing and shaping change and development. This chapter introduces resilience and its different meanings. It explains the analytical lens applied to resilience and change, setting out a broadly political ecology approach. This acknowledges the diverse meanings and different types of knowledges that construct them, as well as the contestations and claims surrounding them. It recognises socially constructed discourses, as well as more realist meanings, and helps to distinguish and evaluate both the normative and analytical dimensions, and to give weight to the empirical and policy applications, and the everyday lived experiences of resilience.

Defining resilience

Box 1.1 Resilience definitions from different scientific fields

Resilience is…

‘The ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to reorganise and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning).’

‘In the context of exposure to significant adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways.’

‘A multi-dimensional construct … the capacity of individuals, families, communities, systems and institutions to respond, withstand and/or judiciously engage with catastrophic events and experiences; actively making meaning without fundamental loss of identity.’

Source: Author

Many studies have reviewed the different meanings of resilience across fields. Box 1.1 shows three definitions from three distinct scientific fields. This is a highly selective set of resilience definitions. Of course, there are many other definitions, and the term is used in other fields and with different emphases and meanings. Indeed, a number of publications compile and comment on long lists of definitions (for example Martin-Breen & Anderies 2011; Bahadur et al. 2010). Chapter 3 discusses how the concept of resilience has evolved across these different fields. But the three definitions here encapsulate a range of the broad interpretations and popularly understood meanings. The first is from the Resilience Alliance,¹ and focuses on resilience in social ecological systems, which emphasises the integrated system of people and environment, with understanding of resilience derived from ecology but encompassing broader related fields of environmental change and natural resource management. The second is from Michael Ungar, Professor of Social Work who co-directs the Resilience Research Centre.² The third definition comes from the broader perspective of public health, articulated in an editorial from the journal African Health Services.³ These three perspectives, encompassing social ecological systems, human development and applied fields, inform the view of resilience in this book.

These definitions have important similarities. They each identify resilience as capacity – of an individual, community or a system. In addition resilience is both a process and an outcome. It involves not only some notion of staying the same – in terms of maintaining identity or functioning – but also undergoing change, actively engaging in change or adapting to change. One of the most straightforward definitions is from Ann Masten, a leading psychologist working on resilience. She defines resilience as ‘the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances’ (Masten et al. 1990: 425). The significance for my own research is that resilience is a property of individuals, households, communities and social ecological systems. Secondly, resilience is capacity, process and outcome.

These issues are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, but they reveal some of the multiple dimensions and nuances which make resilience so interesting, but also potentially misunderstood and misapplied. As the application of the term expands, across scientific fields and into policy and public discourse, so its meanings get stretched. There is plenty of room for contestation and confusion. For example, there is a critical distinction, and very often confusion, between normative applications that are generally prescriptive and assume resilience is always desirable, and theoretical or descriptive approaches where resilience is neither inherently good nor bad. Importantly there are distinctions in approaches and emphases on whether resilience is about staying the same or changing in response to disturbance; and whether resilience is a process or an outcome of exposure to trauma. Clearly some of these differences might be quite fundamental and might lead not only to different and distinct interpretations, but also suggest or result in different courses of action.

Resilience ideas have emerged in science in the last 40 years, yet have been popular in many areas of policy primarily in the past decade. Table 1.2 shows some of these meanings and applications in different fields and the different concepts that are emphasised and used in them. It also introduces key related concepts and ideas (also see Glossary). In many respects, the concept is still evolving and is developing many hybrid meanings, many applications, and context-specific interpretations. Commentators and analysts debate whether resilience is a boundary object or a buzzword, its analytical depth, and the extent to which shared meanings are apparent. Importantly reading resilience literature across broad fields, including psychology, public health and ecology, also identifies important commonalities, so it is possible to synthesise a resilience approach and the elements it encapsulates. This is summarised in Box 1.2 and constitutes the understanding and approach adopted here.

Table 1.2 Applications and core resilience concepts in different fields

Field	Applications	Concepts
International relations	Understanding military and terrorist threats	Security Critical infrastructure
Social ecological systems	Managing complex systems in times of change Informing adaptive management strategies	Adaptive cycle Adaptive capacity Transformations Linking social and ecological dimensions of resilience
Disasters and disaster risk reduction	Minimising risk and support recovery	Vulnerability Community resilience
Climate change	Adapting to and minimising impacts of climate change	Adaptation Adaptive capacity Climate resilience
Human development	Coping and thriving in times of adversity Individual responses to crises Poverty traps	Individual resilience Human well-being Capacity Agency
Organisational science and social innovation	Managing change	Social learning
Planning	Urban and regional planning	Urban resilience

Source: Brown 2014: 108

This book explores how this approach is applied across many different areas of policy and practice in international development (Chapter 2) and in different fields of science (Chapter 3). I take an inclusive approach to understanding resilience, so that resilience encompasses the ability to withstand, to bounce back from, and to emerge more strongly from shocks and change. The Rockefeller Foundation, which uses resilience as a central theme in its work, and especially in its 100 Resilient Cities project, has a useful definition that takes an inclusive view. But this is a normative stance,

Box 1.2 What does a resilience approach highlight?

• Expect change, manage for change – leads to a prescriptive focus on adaptive management.
• Expect the unexpected – uncertainty and surprise are features of systems.
• Recognise different types of change; slow and fast variables and the interactions between them.
• Crises may provide windows of opportunity – the chance to move to a new regime which may be either better or worse than the existing one.
• Thresholds are a feature of change and most change is not uniform, regular or predictable – thresholds are ecological and social, and may be manifest as ‘tipping points’.
• Multi- and cross-scale issues are important – understanding the interplay and links and interactions is a challenge and has led to examination of polycentric institutions and the concept of ‘panarchy’.
• Interactions with other stressors – climate change, livelihoods, health, markets, migration and settlement – are recognised by the systems lens – but there may be both general and specific forms of resilience.
• Resilience can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it can lead to rigidity or ‘traps’.

Source: Author’s own

showing how resilience is applied and promoted, rather than a scientific definition:

We define resilience as the capacity of individuals, communities, and systems to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of stress and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it. Building resilience is about making people, communities, and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses.

(Rockefeller Foundation 2013)

This inclusive view encompasses at least three dimensions of resilience. First is the ability to resist, cope and bounce back in the face of disturbance. This aspect is conventionally the focus, for example, of a disaster risk reduction approach. It is a ...