The Community Resilience Reader by Daniel Lerch

Author:Daniel Lerch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2017-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Specified Resilience, General Resilience, and Adaptive Capacity

If resilience is about a complex system retaining its identity, does it only involve learning more about the system in question, finding out where thresholds might exist, and then optimizing management to prevent the system crossing those thresholds? Learning more about your system is important, but focusing on only known or suspected thresholds can be a trap.

Understanding how a system responds to a known or suspected threshold (and managing for this) is referred to as specified resilience. Having a capacity to deal with known thresholds is important, but there is also a need to have a capacity to deal with unsuspected thresholds and unimagined shocks. This capacity is referred to as general resilience, the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances of all kinds, including novel ones, so that all parts of the system keep functioning in the same kind of way.

When you prepare your system for a specific disturbance, you may be eroding its capacity to absorb other kinds of disturbances. In other words, there are trade-offs between different kinds of specified resilience. Channeling all your efforts into one kind can reduce resilience in other ways. Therefore, it is necessary to consider how to make a system generally resilient, in all parts of the system and to all kinds of shocks.

What things enhance general resilience? Studies of a variety of social-ecological systems suggest that diversity (especially a diversity of ways for performing the same function, each responding differently to different disturbances), openness (allowing immigration and emigration), reserves, tightness of feedbacks, modularity, a culture of learning and experimentation, and high levels of social capital are all important characteristics of systems with high levels of general resilience.

General resilience is enhanced by high levels of adaptability, sometimes referred to as adaptive capacity. It is the ability of the system to change how its parts work in response to a disturbance. You can also think of it as the capacity to reorganize within the limits of any thresholds, to “learn” how to cope with disturbances.

From the point of view of a system stakeholder, adaptive capacity is about working with the system to sustain its present identity or to move it from an undesirable identity to a desirable one. Sometimes, however, it becomes clear that the system is inevitably going to cross a threshold into an undesirable state from which it cannot recover. Further efforts to try to get the system back into the desirable state just make things worse; they amount to digging the hole deeper. In this situation, it is time to transform into a new kind of system.

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