Resilience
The resilience of a system refers to its tendency to return to a particular state following a perturbation or disturbance, while staying within a limited range of structure and function. This range can refer to social (education, development), economic (capital flows, per capita income), or environmental (biodiversity, food production) variables.
The concept of resilience was originally introduced by Holling (1973) as a concept for understanding the ability of an ecosystem with alternative attractors to persist within a state when subjected to disturbances. This definition was subsequently adopted by Holling (1996), Gunderson (2000), Folke (2006) and Scheffer (2009).
Today, resilience can be understood as an approach to organize and manage social-ecological systems with emphasis on the capacity for renewal, reorganization and development, where disturbances (e.g. extreme weather events) are part of the system’s dynamics and represent opportunities for change or innovation (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Walker et al., 2004; Folke, 2006; Walker and Salt, 2006).In short, resilience is the joint analysis of a system’s ability to adapt and transform (Folke 2016, Biggs et al. 2015).
Resilience can be considered as a positive attribute when the objective is to conserve the configuration of the system, for example, a body of water without cyanobacteria blooms. In other circumstances, resilience is understood as a negative attribute or an obstacle to overcome, for example overcoming feedback (e.g. high birth rates) in the fight against extreme poverty.
The term “systemic resilience” has recently been introduced, a concept that considers simultaneously a set of external forcing, generally of very different nature, that govern the dynamics of the systems.
Key References →
Biggs, R., Schlüter, M. & Schoon, M.L. (eds). 2015. Principles for building resilience. Sustaining ecosystem services in social-ecological systems. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Folke, C. 2016. “Resilience (Republished)”. Ecology and Society 21(4):44. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09088-210444
Folke, C. 2006. Resilience: the emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analysis. Global Environmental Change 16(3):253-267.
Gunderson, l. 2000. Ecological Resilience in Theory and Application. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 425-439.
Gunderson, L.H., C.S. Holling. Editors. 2002. Panarchy. Island Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1–23.
Holling, C.S. 1996. Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. Paginas 31- 44 en P.Schulze, editor. Engineering within ecological constraints. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
Scheffer, M. 2009. Critical transitions in nature and society. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
Walker, B.H. y D. Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
Walker, B.H., C.S. Holling, S.R. Carpenter, y A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2):5. URL: http://www. ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5.
Additional suggested reading
Stockholm Resilience Centre (2017). Poniendo en práctica el pensamiento resiliente. Siete principios para desarrollar la resiliencia en los sistemas social-ecológicos. URL: http://applyingresilience.org/es/start-es/
Mazzeo N., Zurbriggen C., Trimble M., Bianchi P., Gadino I., Steffen M. (2017). Sostenibilidad ambiental del Uruguay: aportes desde el pensamiento resiliente. Instituto Sudamericano para Estudios sobre Resiliencia y Sostenibilidad (SARAS). Bella Vista, Maldonado, Uruguay.