Resilience

Overview

In a context of accelerating global change, and increasing evidence for non-linear responses in social-ecological systems, new approaches are needed to meet the daunting water-food-poverty challenge. This topic working group aims to analyze how resilience perspectives can inform discussions about water, food production, and poverty alleviation. It consists of a core team of 1-2 resilience champions from each CPWF basin, and it is facilitated by Line Gordon and Elin Enfors from Stockholm Resilience Center, with support from Alain Vidal in the management team.

The Resilience Topic Working Group (TWG) was launched with a workshop in March 2011, during the Resilience 2011 conference in Tempe, Arizona.

The expectation is that this will be a dynamic, creative, and self-organizing group that promotes and supports resilience thinking in on-going CPWF research, that synthesizes the outcomes of the CPWF research through a resilience lens, and that ultimately contributes to advancing the understanding of how to meet the global water-food-poverty challenge in a turbulent world.

Key questions

What does resilience thinking bring to the discussions on food, water and poverty?
How can resilience approaches be used to better understand these issues?
How is this relevant for the Challenge Program on Water and Food?

Work for 2011

To harmonize the work between the basins, all basin champions are currently developing working definitions of their respective social-ecological systems, using Ellinor Ostrom’s framework. Parallel to this they also prioritize what their resilience research will focus on, i.e. whether they will deal with some aspects that are particularly relevant in their contexts (e.g. disturbances, thresholds, capacity for renewal and learning etc) or whether they will attempt to conduct entire resilience assessments. Other activities in this TWG include the development of a position paper that links theoretical approaches in resilience thinking to case studies in the CPWF (Phase I & II), and participation in the organization of the Forum in Nov 2011.

Resilience perspectives to identify solutions to the water‐food‐poverty nexus

The resilience lens provides a new framework for analyzing social—ecological systems in a changing world. It is interdisciplinary and most, studies crosses to at least some degree the natural-social science divide. It represents an area of explorative research under rapid development with major policy implications for sustainable development. Resilience itself refers to the capacity of a social‐ecological system to both withstand perturbations from, for example, climate or economic shocks and to rebuild and renew itself afterwards. Resilience thus emphasizes persistence, as well as development and innovation, whereby it deals with adaptation as well as the capacity to navigate and shape change.

The resilience approach focuses on the dynamic interplay between periods of gradual and quick development.

A core of resilience thinking is that change, and not stability, is the norm. Fluctuations, rather than equilibriums is what shapes human‐ecosystem interactions. Threats like high variability, surprises and disturbances, are therefore also considered as opportunities, where we actively need to improve our capacity to take advantage of these (to build resilience). Otherwise they might be destructive rather than constructive. To analyze your system, or problem, through the resilience lens, put particular focus on dynamics/change/disturbance, non‐linearity, thresholds, cross‐scale dynamics and the existence of multiple regimes. Important from a management perspective is to understand how to stay or change trajectory (adaptive management) or even create a new set of variables (transformative management)

Resilience thinking brings an inherently transdisciplinary approach to the analysis of food, water and poverty. Humans and nature are seen as integrated systems where both sub‐systems shape each other. Diversity of human and natural capitals, networking abilities, capacity for learning and experimentation, trust and leadership are key ingredients in building resilience.

A resilience approach is also a useful for management purposes, since it helps the understanding of how to maintain a system on a desirable development trajectory, or alternatively how to enable transformation if the system is stuck on an undesirable path.