9    Social ecological resilience and human security

Katrina Brown

Introduction: what is resilience?

This chapter discusses how resilience concepts are used in contemporary discussions of global change. It explores the areas of overlap, contradiction and tension, and highlights how resilience ideas might inform and enrich human security understandings and analyses. The discussion starts by introducing the term and its origins, and current usage.

Resilience is a term which is widely used in common parlance and which is associated with a number of fields of (social and natural) science. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of resilience is: 1) the ability to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed; 2) (of a person) ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. The word originates from the Latin resilire ‘to leap back’. As I show here, it is used in quite specific ways in different fields. Most of the discussion presented here centers on how resilience is used in studying linked social ecological systems and applied to environmental change.

The concept of resilience is presently infusing policy and scientific debates. In the field of global change, resilience is gaining popularity and traction in fields such as climate change, environmental change, economic development and national security, in addition to more “traditional” fields such as Disaster Response and Recovery. Resilience ideas are evident in international science and policy statements such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and in the recent Human Development Report (UNDP, 2008), Commission of Climate Change and Development (2009), and initiatives such as the World Bank’s Program for Climate Resilience. Nongovernmental organizations including Christian Aid and Oxfam, and think-tanks such as UK Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) have used the term to frame their policy documents and analysis. Thus the concept is rapidly gaining salience within environmental and development policy and within research at the interface of natural and social sciences.

Resilience is also prominent in a number of distinct fields including engineering, mental health and child and developmental psychology. In each of these fields there are a different evolution of concepts and different applications of resilience. For example, Masten and Obradovic (2008) provide a helpful overview of four decades of research and theory on resilience in human developmental sciences. Originating in the 1970s these perspectives have explored how individuals overcome adversity, aiming to identify the factors which promote or protect individuals. In human developmental science, individual resilience refers to “processes of, capacity for or patterns of positive adaptation during or following adverse experiences that have the potential to disrupt or destroy the successful functioning of the person” (Masten and Obradovic, 2008:2). The authors show how the strands of resilience thinking from the human development and social-ecological systems fields come together to inform policy on disaster preparation and recovery and making the link between human individuals and the complex dynamic systems within which they live.

How is resilience applied to environmental change?

Resilience perspectives are increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of social ecological systems and how they respond to a range of different perturbations (see the definitions in Table 9.1). In this context, resilience is understood as the capacity of a system to absorb recurrent disturbances so as to retain its essential structures, processes and feedbacks. The term is becoming widely used in analyzing the way in which environmental change (including climate change, erosion of biological diversity, land use change) affects ecosystem services and the people and societies who depend on them. Originating in ecological science and closely linked to Holling’s concept of the adaptive cycle (Holling 1973; Gunderson, 2000), resilience is now used in interdisciplinary analysis of the interactions of people and nature, applied to the notion of a linked social ecological system, understood as a complex adaptive system comprising a bio-geophysical unit and its associated social actors and institutions (e.g. Berkes and Folke, 1998).

Resilience in this literature is fundamentally about how a system can deal with disturbance and surprise. For social ecological systems examined as a set of interactions between people and the ecosystems they depend on, resilience involves three properties: the amount of change a system can undergo and retain the same structure and functions; the degree to which it can re-organize; the degree to which the system can build capacity to learn and to adapt. The present literature encompasses a range of concepts; complexity, transformability and thresholds, dynamics and disequilibria, adaptation, renewal, re-organization and learning (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2001; Walker et al., 2006).

Janssen and colleagues’ analysis (2006) shows how research on resilience has spread from ecological sciences, how scholarly networks have become established and how it links with work on vulnerability and adaptation. Central concepts for social sciences in this area of research on resilience of social ecological systems are adaptive capacity, self-organization and learning. These ideas have been used particularly in studies of adaptive governance (Folke et al., 2005) and adaptive institutions (Brown, 2006) that examine how systems can be managed to promote resilience and support learning and adaptation. This area of research brings together ideas from ecology on adaptive management (Berkes and Folke, 1998) and from social sciences on adaptive co-management and collaborative or social learning (Lee, 1993; Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001). Lebel et al. (2006) have summarized a series of empirical studies to demonstrate how various attributes of governance relate to capacities to manage resilience, thus linking issues such as participation, deliberation, accountability, and scale to knowledge, uncertainty, ability to learn and to self-organize. Institutional analysis has been led by political scientists, with anthropologists contributing important insights from the study of local level management of natural resources by specific ethnic groups or in particular cultural contexts. Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of common property resource management and institutional diversity in managing complex systems has been at the forefront of institutional analysis of resilience (e.g. Ostrom, 2005). Box 9.1 highlights some of the key features of resilience thinking most pertinent to understanding global and environmental change. Relevant aspects are the distinction between general and specific resilience; fast and slow variables; and recognizing uncertainty surprise and thresholds as “normal” characteristics of a system and how it changes.

But of course there are significant shortcomings and gaps in the social scientific conceptualization of resilience and fundamental difficulties in transferring concepts originating in the ecological realm to social analysis. Reusswig (2007), in reviewing a major interdisciplinary effort in this area (Walker et al., 2006), has drawn attention to some key weaknesses in the applicability of resilience theory for social systems: there is little evidence from history that societies evolve in an “adaptive cycle” proposed in ecology (Gunderson and Holling, 2002); and social resilience theory is bereft of the analysis of structural factors in society that promote resilience for some in the face of lack of resilience for many.

In a review of the contribution of a resilience framework to understanding how societies adapt to environmental change Nelson et al. (2007) highlight the respective strengths and weaknesses of a resilience approach compared to conventional analysis of adaptation. Conventional social science approaches (originating in human geography, sociology, and development studies) examine the agency of social actors and the capacity of institutions to respond to specific environmental stimuli. This yields insights into vulnerability of different actors to specific stressors. But a resilience approach takes a systems view, giving a more dynamic perspective and enabling a more process-orientated analysis across scales. These aspects, I maintain, could also inform human security approaches to global change.

Where do security and resilience meet?

What then is the relationship between ideas of security and resilience, applied specifically in the field of understanding human dimensions of environmental change – i.e. human security approaches?

First we need to briefly review how resilience ideas permeate conventional security debates and conceptualizations. Resilience and security are often each interpreted as counterparts of vulnerability, such that enhancing resilience and enhancing security are offered as means of overcoming vulnerability – of people and places. The use of resilience in conventional security approaches is quite distinctive, in terms of how resilience is interpreted, from how it applies to and could inform a human security approach.

Resilience and national security

In conventional international relations understandings of security, resilience is used in particular ways which are quite distinct from the social ecological systems perspective. Thus, for national security, resilience is about strengthening responses, resisting change and defending and maintaining stability. In many respects this interpretation of resilience under conventional security approaches (as opposed to human security approaches) is closer to engineering resilience in infrastructure (see Table 9.1). For instance, the IPPR Commission on National Security in the Twenty-first Century (2008) final report devotes a whole chapter to resilience. Here it is framed as the need to protect critical infrastructure in the face of intensified vulnerabilities. The approach requires minimum resilience standards and technical, regulatory and effective planning and information to maintain services. The UK government’s perspective is encapsulated in the Cabinet Office’s UK Resilience homepage where it declares its aim to “reduce the risk from emergencies so that people can go about their business freely and with confidence … provide a resource for civil protection practitioners, supporting the work that goes on across the UK to improve emergency preparedness” (see www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience.aspx). This approach can also be seen to echo elements of Dalby’s understanding of securitization (2009: 46). As such it does not conform to a more dynamic view of resilience that emerges from the social ecological systems literature. Furthermore, Evans and Steven (2009) show how the interpretation and adoption of resilience ideas in national security approaches is inherently political, and that for conservatives, resilience’s appeal to tradition and identity is strong. However, they argue, the conservative instinct to resist change of all kinds is a clear threat to a system’s ability to adapt to change, and goes against a social ecological systems view of resilience. Thus there are many contradictions and tensions in how the term is used.

Resilience and human security

Resilience is interpreted quite differently from the human security perspective, and is becoming more widely applied in writing on vulnerability and adaptation to environmental change. The phrase and notion most prominent is that of “building resilience” as a means of ameliorating vulnerability or strengthening disaster preparedness, reduction and responses. For example, Oxfam’s recent briefing paper (2009) talks about “people centred resilience” which can help vulnerable farmers address climate change and enhance food security. This mirrors the WRI’s definition of “Roots of Resilience” and “routes to resilience” as a means of increasing capacity and wealth of the poor in developing countries through improved natural resource management efforts, payments for ecosystem services and supportive policy and infrastructure measures (WRI, 2008). A number of NGOs have also developed strategies to build “disaster-resilient communities” to address climate change and natural resource related events such as tsunamis, tropical storms and floods (e.g. Christian Aid, nd; US Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System Programme, 2007) (see Box 9.1). A human security approach on building resilience also leads towards an explicit or implicit targeting of the most vulnerable groups, taking the differentiated capacities of individuals, households and communities as a fundamental starting point.

I suggest that there are two very important differences between the two concepts (human security and resilience from a social ecological systems perspective) and how they are applied, and how in turn they are related to linked terms such as vulnerability and adaptation. These two differences concern first, how they emphasize stability and dynamics; and second, how they view individuals and their agency.

A resilience approach is based on the idea of multiple equilibria or stable states, meaning that it recognizes that change is an integral part of how systems function and that they should be managed for change and in ways to encourage beneficial change, rather than resist change (see Box 9.1). A systems approach also sees dynamic linkages as important ways in which systems function – through feedbacks and interplay across scales or levels. This is somewhat different from many human security approaches which emphasize stability in coping with change and disturbance.

Second, resilience in the social ecological systems literature is focused on systems and how they operate. This approach does not give such prominence to understanding the role of individuals and particularly individual agency in responding to changes. This is an area which is more strongly theorized and empirically studied in the human security approach. The social ecological resilience literature addresses issues such as social learning, leadership and innovation and in the past decade analyses of social networks, institutions and knowledge have made important contributions to broadening the field. However, the resilience approach is criticized for under-emphasizing the role of actors, their agency and issues such as power, social relations, as well as the social construction of scientific knowledge and resource governance (see, for example, Nadasdy, 2007, 2010; Leach 2008).

How can resilience inform human security?

Having drawn these important distinctions between how security and resilience concepts – in selected fields of human dimensions of environmental change – this concluding section discusses how some of the ideas from resilience thinking may inform and enhance research on human security (and indeed vice-versa). I suggest there are a number of insights which can be gained across these fields.

The first insight concerns an understanding of the dynamics of change and how different systems – be they ecological systems or social systems such as a community, a city or a household – can respond to different types of disturbance. A resilience approach provides useful insights into the different types of changes and the different responses. First, it distinguishes between fast and slow controlling variables; slow variables are those which determine the dynamics whereas fast variables tend to be those of direct interest to managers. We might think of culture and worldviews as slow variables for example, whereas prices are fast variables. Making this distinction aids in understanding the linkages between different types of change, the impacts and time scale of change and the points of traction for responses. The case of so-called “land grabs” (see Cotula et al., 2009; von Braun and Meinzen-Dick, 2009) is often presented as both a national and human security issue. Yet it also provides an excellent example through which to distinguish the interactions between fast and slow variables, such as the on-going conversion of natural habitats for agriculture and land use and the evolution of tenure and property rights systems over time, versus the sudden price rises in fuel and food. It also highlights the trade-offs between security and resilience approaches occurring at different scales and for different social actors. Thus a resilience lens brings additional dimensions to the human security understanding of land grabs.

The second insight is that resilience thinking recognizes that change in complex adaptive systems is not uniform or predictable; it is characterized by uncertainty and by feedback and abrupt changes often manifest as thresholds or even “tipping points.” Tipping points have come to focus recently in the study of earth systems and the possibility of climate change precipitating shifts in how components of the system function, where a tipping point is defined as the critical point at which a transition is triggered, often by a small incremental change. Tipping points have also been identified for social phenomena – as in the well-known book by Malcolm Gladwell (2000), and indeed interdisciplinary scientists have started to discuss tipping points in relation to climate change and the possible social limits to adaptation (see Adger et al., 2009). A resilience approach also raises the possibility of crises as providing “windows of opportunity” to trigger latent adaptive capacity and perhaps lead to beneficial system change as described by McSweeney and Coomes (2011) in Honduras following Hurricane Mitch.

A third set of insights stems from the view of adaptive capacity which emerges from resilience conceptualization and is supportive of efforts to build capacity and enhance human security. But resilience thinking also takes us beyond adaptation and adaptive capacity to consider the possibility for transformation and transformative capacity. Thus in a resilient social ecological system, disturbance has the potential to create opportunity for doing new things, for innovation and development (Folke, 2006). According to this view, a resilience perspective potentially shifts policies from those that aspire to control change in systems which are assumed to be stable, to managing the capacity of social ecological systems to cope with, adapt to and shape change.

When these ideas are coupled with the insights on multiple stressors and “double exposure,” which have come from human security analysis (e.g. Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008) and insights from adaptation studies which characterize different responses (see Ensor and Berger, 2009), then the understanding of how different societies or systems can respond to change might be considerably expanded. In conclusion, there are areas where social ecological resilience concepts and human security approaches together can add significantly to current analysis of the human dimensions of environmental change.

Acknowledgment

Katrina Brown is grateful for support from ESRC Professorial Fellowship ‘Resilient development in social ecological systems’ (RES-051-27-0263).

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