IN QUEST OF A THEORY OF ADAPTIVE CHANGE

C. S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson, and Donald Ludwig

In all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the last decades of the twentieth century, cascades of changes occurred on a global scale. Collapse of the former Soviet Union and its continuing struggle for stability and for ways to restructure have propagated international reverberations far beyond its borders. Increases in connectivity through the Internet are stimulating a flowering of novel experiments that are affecting commerce, science, and international community. Migrations of people, some forced by political upheaval and some initiated as a search for new opportunity, are both threatening and enriching the international order. There have been dramatic changes in global environmental systems—from climate change that is already upon us, to the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer. Novel diseases have emerged in socially and ecologically disturbed areas of the world and have spread globally, through the increased mobility of people. The tragedy of AIDS, and its origins, transformation, and dispersion because of land-use and social changes, is a signal of deep and broad changes that will yield further surprises and crises. More and more evidence indicates that global climate change has already produced an increase in severe weather that, combined with inappropriate coastal development, has caused dramatic rises in insurance claims and human loss of life. Still other more subtle changes linking ecological, economic, and social forces are occurring on a global scale, such as the typical example described in Box 1-1, regarding the collapse of fisheries.

These examples of global environmental change signal that the stresses on the planet have achieved a new level because of the intensity and scale of human activities. Are these activities leading to a world with impoverished natural endowments, even deeper inequities among peoples, and the ultimate collapse of civil society? Or is that too easy a conclusion? Contradicting projections of collapse is the possibility that human foresight and innovation can reverse those trends and develop paths that sustain natural diversity and create opportunity.

We do not intend to evaluate the degradation and potential for collapse of human and natural systems in this book. That has been done as well and as objectively as can be expected elsewhere (McNeill 2000). Even raising the question triggers controversy that is not particularly well founded on objective fact or adequate theory.

Instead, our purpose is to develop an integrative theory to help us understand the changes occurring globally. We seek to understand the source and role of change in systems—particularly the kinds of changes that are transforming, in systems that are adaptive. Such changes are economic, ecological, social, and evolutionary. They concern rapidly unfolding processes and slowly changing ones—gradual change and episodic change, local and global changes.

The theory that we develop must of necessity transcend boundaries of scale and discipline. It must be capable of organizing our understanding of economic, ecological, and institutional systems. And it must explain situations where all three types of systems interact. The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has lead us to coin the term panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable. Thus, we drew upon the Greek god Pan to capture an image of unpredictable change and upon notions of hierarchies across scales to represent structures that sustain experiments, test results, and allow adaptive evolution.

We start the search for sufficient theory by turning to examples where there is adequate history—examples of interactions between people and nature at regional scales. There we see patterns of change that are similar to the more recent global ones—but examples where there has been more history of response. These include dramatic changes in the ecosystems and landscapes of ecosystems, with subsequent changes for society and economic conditions. There have been spasms of biodiversity loss as a consequence of the intersection of climate extremes, poor land use, and global economic pressures. In places, such as in some nations in southeast Africa, these exacerbate political instability. The results are not only erosion of the natural world but also erosion of trust in the institutions of governance. But in other places there has been notable learning. Degraded systems have been restored, organizations restructured, and management revitalized.

How do we begin to track down the cause of the failures and explain the occasional successes? Consider some recent resource management failures:

• Some fisheries have collapsed in spite of widespread public support for sustaining them and the existence of a highly developed theory of fisheries management.

• Moderate stocking of cattle in semiarid rangelands has increased vulnerability to drought.

• Pest control has created pest outbreaks that become chronic.

• Flood control and irrigation developments have created large ecological and economic costs and increasing vulnerability.

A number of cases point to a common cause behind such examples of...