Preparing for Practice:

The Essence of Resilience Thinking

There are any number of ways of putting resilience science into practice, and it needs to be said at the outset that following strict recipes and prescriptions simply isn't appropriate. Working with resilience requires you to constantly reflect on what you're doing and why you're doing it. And once an assessment of resilience is done, you are encouraged to go back and reexamine it, expand on it, and then adapt accordingly. Our focus in most of this book is on the resilience of social-ecological systems (linked systems of humans and nature). Resilience is a dynamic property of such a system, and managing for it requires a dynamic and adaptive approach.

This being said, the activities undertaken as part of resilience practice can be grouped into three broad steps: describing the system, assessing its resilience, and managing its resilience. In this book we'll provide a variety of ways you can undertake these steps, but the ultimate aim is that you devise your own approach.

While resilience science is not new, attempts to apply it in real-world situations have only recently started taking shape. Workshops of all sizes and flavors have been held around the world on various aspects of resilience practice, and one clear lesson is emerging from this experience. People seeking to undertake resilience assessments or work with resilience need to be in a "resilience frame of mind" to begin with. In other words, it's unlikely they'll engage with resilience practice if they haven't some idea of what resilience is about.

That's not a major hurdle. People with a bit of life experience and some responsibility for managing a system (e.g., a farm, a catchment, a business, or a national park) are usually very quick in picking up on resilience thinking. These systems are self-organizing systems, and people working with them have been attempting to understand them in their day-to-day work. Resilience thinking provides a useful framework for a deeper engagement on why these systems behave as they do.

A simple overview of resilience science is provided in our earlier book, Resilience Thinking, but there are also many other resources available at the website of the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org). This is a group of organizations and individuals involved in interlinked aspects of ecological, social, and economic research. It is the network that has created and developed the framework of "resilience thinking."

Resilience and Identity

The word resilience is now common in many vision and mission statements. But ask the people who use these statements what they think it means, and you get a range of different answers, most of which relate to how something or someone copes with a shock or a disturbance.

Concepts of resilience are used in all sorts of disciplines, but the term has four main origins—psychosocial, ecological, disaster relief (and military), and engineering. We discuss these in chapter 5, but it's helpful to consider them briefly in this introduction.

Psychologists have long recognized marked differences in the resilience of individuals confronted with traumatic and disastrous circumstances. Considerable research has gone into trying to understand how individuals and societies can gain and lose resilience.

Ecologists have tended to describe resilience in two ways: one focused on the speed of return following a disturbance, the other focused on whether or not the system can recover.

People engaging with resilience from the perspective of disaster relief or in a military arena incorporate both aspects (i.e., speed and ability to recover). Indeed, there is a lot of commonality in the understanding of resilience in the three areas of psychology, ecology, and disaster relief.

In engineering the take on resilience is somewhat different. In fact, engineers more commonly use the term robustness with a connotation of "designed resilience." It differs from the other three uses in that it assumes bounded uncertainty—that is, the kinds and ranges of disturbances and shocks are known, and the system being built is designed to be robust in the face of these shocks. This view is now changing, and in chapter 5 we look at the emergence of what is being dubbed a "metarobustness" approach. This sees a convergence of ideas about resilience as used in the other three domains.

In this book we present a definition and description of resilience that is being used commonly by scientists in many areas of inquiry. It is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks—to have the same identity. Put more simply, resilience is the ability to cope with shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way.

A key word in this definition is identity. It emerged independently in ecological and psychosocial studies, and it is both important and useful because it imparts the idea that people, societies, ecosystems, and social-ecological systems can all exhibit quite a lot of variation, be subjected to disturbance and cope, without changing their "identity"—without becoming something else.

The following pages seek to present a simple overview of the essence of resilience thinking. If you can appreciate the following ten key points, you're in a good position to consider how you can move from thinking to practice.

1. The systems we are dealing with are self-organizing.

2. There are limits to a system's self-organizing capacity.

3. These systems have linked social, economic, and biophysical domains.

4. Self-organizing systems move through adaptive cycles.

5. Linked adaptive cycles function across multiple scales.

6. There are three related dimensions to resilience: specified resilience, general resilience, and transformability.

7. Working with resilience involves both adapting and transforming.

8. Maintaining or building resilience comes at a cost.

9. Resilience is not about knowing everything.

10. Resilience is not about not changing.

1. Self-Organizing Systems

First and foremost, resilience thinking requires that you recognize and appreciate that the systems we depend upon are complex adaptive systems. We use the...