What do the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan, and the volcano eruption in Central Java , Indonesia have in common? Each of these catastrophic events entails massive devastation on physical infrastructures, and causes tremendous amounts of social and economic losses. Further, it spawns political ramifications that could have resulted in deep, and often dramatic, political changes. Despite differing causing agentsāa Jihadist terrorist group, a failure of emergency instruments, and a natural force, respectivelyāand different degrees of destruction, these disasters share one trait; each is a foray against the sociotechnical system that embodies modern culture. Yet, it is this very core of our technological society that differentiates one disaster from another. For it is the sociotechnical system built and arranged in such a way to support human life that defines how a society is able to survive shocks and disturbances, be they natural or man-made. In other words, the resilience of sociotechnical systems determines whether a crisis will be short-lived or prolonged in the aftermath of disaster.
Recently, resilience has become a ābuzzwordā of global conversation in academic and practitioner circles. Also, it is increasingly gaining currency in business corporations, policymaking, and transnational governance. Two reasons explain why resilience is emerging in prominence among top thinkers, leaders, and planners. Since entering the twenty-first century, the world has seen too many crises and extreme events that profoundly disrupted social systems, devastated infrastructures, and destabilized economies. It has never been seen in history how humanity becomes deeply vulnerable to various catastrophes with greater magnitudes and higher frequencies of occurrence. Moreover, the scale and impact of the so-called black swans (Taleb 2007) have gone beyond our capacity to cope with, despite rapid advancements in scientific knowledge produced to measure risk and predict the next disaster (Haimes 2015). Coupling with the growing trend of disaster is a slow but chronic process of environmental deformation, which prompts the global concern over climate change and long-term pollutions. This slow disaster is gradually altering the whole landscape of the Earth, affecting lands, rivers, coastlines as well as cities and urban spaces. It is an irreversible process that comes with unprecedented social, economic, and political costs (Blaikie et al. 2004; Toya and Skidmore 2007; Lindell 2013). This ācosmopolitan moment,ā to follow Ulrich Beck (2009), has shifted the attention of experts and leaders from managing risk of disaster to coping with its impact and consequences. It is this stream of thinking that gives rise to resilience as an enticing term in the world of disaster we live today.
In the last decade, numerous international conferences, seminars, and meetings were organized to discuss and formulate strategies and policies that are deemed practically effective and socially helpful to build disaster resilience. These conversations and dialogues address resilience as a concept that has to be well understood in order to reproduce a set of conditions that improve our abilities to endure disturbances especially at an enormous scale. Along with that, hundreds of books, edited volumes, journal articles, and scientific reports have been published to discover quintessential ingredients of resilience. In general, the chief objective of these academic works focuses on a twofold question: How to measure resilience and how to enhance it.
So why do we need another book on resilience when a plethora of publications on this subject are readily available?
Resilience is a complex construct. It arises from multi-faceted processes, and it does not stay fixed permanently. It develops and undevelops. This is the basic premise of this book. To illuminate how these resilience-making processes take place, more than one single explanation is needed. There are pre-determined factors that define how systems and communities are able to withstand unforeseen shocks. These factors are part of human intervention in the design and organization of system or community. There are also other factors that function as a series of coincidences rather than being intentionally embodied in the affected system and community. While the latter is fairly highlighted in existing works on resilience, the former is studied further because of its predictability (Holling 2001; Haimes et al. 2008). That said, the present book follows this direction while upholding a conviction that resilience is embedded in multi-layered structures ; that is, the ability to recover from catastrophic damages is constituted by a multitude of system properties.
In the current literature on resilience, one can find a deep division between two major approaches; each focuses on a different domain of the underlying attributes. This division seems to follow the chasm C.P. Snow (1959) once pointed out in his famous essay on the two cultures. On one side stands a group of social scientists and humanities scholars who consider resilience as a characteristic of human societies that functions to respond to dramatic changes unfolding in the environment. This group of academics delves into how social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances shape human capability to endure bitter impacts of disaster. Thus, the notion of resilience in this perspective is inherently social, and the capacity for recovery and reconstruction lies in the arrangement of social structures and inter-personal relations. Such a view suggests that resilience resides in the way in which our society is organized, and that institutions and cultures matter a great deal. On the other side, engineers and natural scientists conceptualize resilience more as a problem of physical and material durability . Thus in this scientific approach, resilience appears to be a technical problem, which requires technical solutions. Concentrated on robustness of complex, interdependent infrastructures such as power grid, transportation, and the cybernet , these researchers are more interested in developing formulas and models to predict and improve system resilience.
While each approach has its own virtue in defining and explaining the mechanisms and processes that produce resilience, a gap is left in the middle ground between the social and technical domains that both camps scantily recognizes. It is the lack of sensibilities to what happens in between that the present book aims to elucidate. The book argues that resilience is neither merely social nor purely physical. In the modern world where technology and society are deeply intertwined in everyday life, resilience has to be understood as a double performance of social and technical systems, hence sociotechnical system . This is the focal point of this edited book. It explores resilience through a hybrid lens using the sociotechnical framework. It is posited that capacity for coping with disturbance and disruption during the time of crisis is largely shaped by how organizations, politics, and culture are entangled with technical arrangements of physical infrastructures. Describing only the social part without understanding how it is supported by the technical is deeply inadequate. Likewise, modelling the physical infrastructure without a basis for social and institutional analysis will result in weak resilience management. Thus, the chief objective the book is set to pursue is precisely to fill a lacuna in the mainstream view on resilience in which an integrated perspective of social and technical factors remains barely present. This book sheds light on how resilience is essentially sociotechnical.
Bouncing Back
Decades before it became a hype of global discussions, resilience had already been a central interest among ecologists. Back in the 1970s, resilience drew full attention of these scientists who were curious about the inner mechanisms allowing ecological systems to survive long-term disruptions caused by various kinds of natural agents (May 1972; Harrison 1979). A model was then developed by the ecologists to illustrate how the behavior of ecological system when undergoing gradual changes in response to the emergence of new environment (Holling 1973). This model revolves around a thesis that our ecological system is essentially in a constant search for a new equilibrium. In this light, ecological resilience is understood as a multi-state process of long-term transformations (Gunderson 2000). Later, researchers from this stream of inquiry began to expand the notion of resilience to include human agency in the equation. This brought the socio-ecological system into the central framework of the field, which places human activities on a par with ecological entities in the formulation of resilience (Adger 2000; Berkes et al. 2000). One of the first social scientists to bring resilience in the sociological discourse is Aaron Wildavsky (1988). In his Searching for Safety, Wildavsky, following Holling , highlights how resilience is remarkably important especially in a situation marked by inherent uncertainty. Despite a good deal of attention on resilience during this period, the concept remained unnoticed by academics and practitioners for years.
Then came a series of shocking events that shook up the world and marked the twenty-first century as the age of crisis. On 11 September 2001, two Boeing jet planes crashed into World ...