When Resilience Is Not Enough: Learning from nature to regenerate social and ecological systems

art by Victoria Nakada (Japan | USA)

Aline Brachet (Appia-Capacity); Tarik Chekchak (Institut des Futurs Souhaitables)

Conflict resolution and nature conservation practitioners should challenge the concept of resilience when contexts require social and ecological regeneration instead.

Context

In the Sahel, most interventions still mention community resilience as an objective, but such models no longer respond to people’s needs. Instead, traditional communities are challenged by demographic changes, as youth now represent close to 70 per cent of the population and many villages have become suburbs. Meanwhile, globalization (of the economy, trade, and values) is shifting power relations. Resilience of Sahelians to such a dysfunctional context is not what is required, but rather a renewal of the local, national, and regional social contracts. In the Biovallée, the valley of the Drome River in southeastern France, the level of pollution of the river in the 1980s was the product of radical changes in human production and consumption systems (farming, dams, waste management): its own capacity to adapt to human intervention (its resilience) would not have been enough for the river to regenerate. What has been required was a total change in trajectory of the socio-ecosystem.[i] 

This article makes the argument for and illustrates the necessary paradigm shift away from strengthening resilience and toward building the conditions required to regenerate both society and nature.

Both authors, in their respective fields of work, find that defining people or nature as ‘resilient’ is sometimes counterproductive. The concept of resilience is based on the idea that nature and people can adapt to any shocks; it has thus become a means to encourage people (or ecosystems) to adapt to what should not be acceptable.

What’s been done

The concept of resilience[ii] is helpful for understanding how a system can be dynamic, constantly evolving, and maintain its “identity”[iii] despite the changes it undergoes. In nature and in society, it is often observed that after a crisis, species and humans adapt to, and even learn from, the stressful experience. Like the species of trees that requires a fire to germinate, or like Sahelian herders who diversify their cattle or adjust their path to overcome the yearly drought.

In socio-ecosystems, a situation does not instantaneously jump from harmony to violent conflict, and an ecosystem is rarely destroyed overnight. Along the way to negative change, resilience plays a role. But there comes a point when any trigger can bring the entire system into a new identity: for example, a coral reef dies or a community system disaggregates. When such a threshold is passed, the concept of resilience becomes irrelevant.

In the socio-ecosystems we have studied, crises never happened once and they were never isolated from what was happening in the super-system or sub-systems. For example, the near collapse of the Drome River system in the 1980s was due to a succession of human interventions that had challenged its natural resilience so deeply that the river basin had shifted towards a new identity: a polluted water. This is not called a crisis, but a “revolt” in the Panarchy[iv] model. In the Sahel, pastoralism is mistakenly described as a sector facing endless and repetitive crises. However, this may not be a crisis as such, but the signs of a “revolt” of a socio-ecosystem that has overcome the threshold that allows resilience to work. Unless the new identity of the socio-ecosystem in the Sahel is acknowledged and understood, the interventions designed to overcome the difficulties will fail. 

Looking ahead

Two principles taken from nature could nourish peacebuilding practice. The authors invite readers to consider them, beginning with the Sahelian example:

Principle 1: Bet on the resources that are abundant in your system. In nature, abundant atoms, not rare ones, are used to synthetize all living materials. In the Sahel, one of the abundant resources is the population under 25. Youth have been the target of resilience programs for years. Governance structures, all of which vest decision-making power in elders, resist freeing this abundant resource from their system. What if youth were supported, not be resilient, but to fully achieve their revolt through other ways than by joining armed groups or leaving the pastoral zones for the cities?

Principle 2: Think of your system as both specific and dynamic; consider that it is able to shift to a different type of system, and anticipate what it might become (for example, borders and limits can be seen as cell membranes, not as solid walls that prevent exchanges with the outside world). In the Sahel, the “identity” of mobile herders is currently at stake: policymakers constantly ask them to “modernize” (read: “sedentarize”), driving the system out of its functional identity. Yet mobile cattle remain the only option for inhabitants of the Sahel to produce locally with a positive and balanced environmental, social, and economic impact. What if mobile pastoralists took control of their own future mobile identity through renewed exchanges with the outside (i.e., environmental and social contracts)?

From our practice, the most difficult aspect of applying these principles in the Sahel is resisting current dominant narratives of adaptation and resilience. We need to design the global framework for peaceful revolts within any dying system and better design and support social and ecological “identity” shifts. It requires time for regeneration, just as time has been needed for destruction. A desirable future cannot fit into a project’s logical framework. We need to shift from “project mode” to “process mode” to regenerate both nature and society.

[i] Authors look at the context they engage in as a unique system composed of natural resources, governance rules and patterns, actors, relationships between human needs and eco-system health, etc. Those dimensions interact as a network and compose a socio-ecosystem.

[ii] Defined by the Resilience Alliance network of researchers as: "the ability to absorb a disturbance and reorganize while maintaining essentially the same functions, the same structure and the same feedback loops, and therefore the same identity."

[iii] Identity refers to the definition of the functionality of any system (here a coral, a community)

[iv] Panarchy is a framework of nature's rules, hinted at by the name of the Greek god of nature—Pan—whose persona also evokes an image of unpredictable change. Panarchy draws the interconnection of the adaptive circles, trying to make sense of the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable, Holling et al. 2002