Last night via email Roderic Gill, who directs the Centre for Ecological Economics and Water Policy Research (CEEWPR), introduced me to the new Transdisciplinary Journeys Blog. Gill suggested that our blog journeys seemed to be on parallel paths. After looking at their introductory posts, I agree. Here's a sampler. I also linked them up on our sidebar. Nice to see this thinking getting more air time.
Transdisciplinary Thinking, posted by Roderic GillIn my view, there is a general tendency in the ecological economics community to spend little time with its core and underlying philosophy of transdisciplinarianism. To me, the transdisciplinary focus is at the heart and root of ecological economics. Little attention though, seems to be devoted to really coming to grips with what the word really means and implies. It is a very powerful concept. And a major challenge for application and procedure. In essence, the ecological economics transdisciplinary focus implies a synergistic alliance between and across conventional disciplinary boundaries. Transdisciplinary is more fundamentally participative than multi-disciplinary (where the agenda for problem definition and the management of cooperation still resides with a disciplinary instigator). The transdisciplinary approach implies cooperation from beginning to end; cooperation at the problem or issue interpretation stage through to the cooperative implementation of results. …
Sustainability and Resilience, posted by Leo Dutra
The goal of sustainable development is to create and maintain ‘prosperous’ social, economic, and ecological systems. These systems are intimately linked: humanity depends on services of ecosystems for its wealth and security and humans can transform ecosystems into more or less desirable conditions. Ecosystem services include provision of clean water and air, food production, fuel, and others. Yet human action can render ecosystems unable to provide these services, with consequences for human livelihoods, vulnerability, and security. Such negative shifts represent loss of resilience.
In operationalising resilience, managing for sustainability in socio-economic systems means not pushing the system to its limits but maintaining diversity and variability, leaving some slack and flexibility, and not trying to optimise some parts of the system but maintaining redundancy. It also means learning how to enhance adaptability, and understanding when and where it is possible to intervene in management. These ‘soft’ management approaches are necessary because ‘hard’ management approaches involving quantitative targets for resource production often do not work. Linear models on which ‘hard’ management depends tend to be incomplete or even misleading in the management of the ecosystems of the world. Equilibrium-based predictive models do not perform well with complex social-ecological systems.
This particular view of resilience is in accordance with the Ecological Economics thinking on sustainability. Sustainable futures are inherently unpredictable and reinforce the idea (proposed by CEEWPR researchers Tony Meppem and Roderic Gill) that sustainability cannot be planned in a rational fashion. In the absence of a linear, mechanical universe that would have permitted simple, rational measures, the best bet for sustainability involves capability for self-organisation and capacity for learning and adaptation.
More resilient social-ecological systems are able to absorb larger shocks without changing in fundamental ways. When massive transformation is inevitable, resilient systems contain the components needed for renewal and reorganisation; they can cope with, adapt to, or reorganise without sacrificing the provision of ecosystem services. Resilience is often associated with diversity—of species, of human opportunity, and of economic options—that maintains and encourages both adaptation and learning.
Social-ecological systems are constantly changing and the design of sustainable futures should encompass this changing nature. Resilience emphasises systems including ‘humans-in-nature’, describing, therefore, a more holistic approach toward sustainability.
Resilience is a useful sub theme of sustainability in that it focuses on bringing together thinking about human systems (short time horizons) with long-term outcomes (ecological systems such as coral reefs). Management that builds resilience can sustain social-ecological systems in the face of surprise, unpredictability, and complexity. Resilience-building management is flexible and open to learning. It attends to slowly changing, fundamental variables that create memory, legacy, diversity, and the capacity to innovate in both social and ecological components of the system. It also conserves and nurtures the diverse elements that are necessary to reorganise and adapt to novel, unexpected, and transformative circumstances. Thus, it increases the range of surprises with which a socio-economic-ecological system can cope.
The concept of resilience shifts policies from those that aspire to control change in systems assumed to be stable, to managing the capacity of social-ecological systems to cope with, adapt to, and shape change. Resilience emphasises adaptability of systems and is thus a useful focus for sustainability. Impacts on ecological resilience will affect socio-cultural and economic resilience as well. The decline of cod fisheries in Newfoundland and Labrador (North America) is an example of the resilience links among ‘panarchical’ cycles of socio-economical and ecological variables. The elimination of the cod stock in the North Atlantic led to the collapse of the economy of the region. After 600 years of profitable fishing in that region, local fishermen nowadays rely on government help for livelihood. The traditions around cod fisheries and the techniques utilised by traditional fishermen may be lost when (and if) the cod stock recover.
Resilience is, therefore, not only an issue of sustainability and options for development, in the present and future, but also an issue of environmental, social and economic security.
Building social-ecological resilience requires understanding of ecosystems that incorporate the knowledge of local users. Thus, the ecological ignorance of some contemporary societies undermines resilience. Technological developments and economic activities based on the perception of decoupled social and ecological systems further contribute to the erosion of resilience. This can be counteracted by understanding the complex connections between people and nature, which create opportunity for technological innovations and economic policies aimed at building resilience.
Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are: (i) structured scenarios and; (ii) active adaptive management. People use scenarios to envision alternative futures and the pathways by which they might be reached. Active adaptive management views policy as a set of experiments designed to reveal processes that build or sustain resilience. It requires, and facilitates, a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.
Managing for resilience embraces sustainability outcomes in relation to the social-ecological system. A changing, uncertain world in transformation demands action to build the resilience of the social-ecological systems, which embrace all of humanity.
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