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Enacting Resilience: A Performative Account of Governing for Urban Resilience
Abstract
Resilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse that has been taken up at a rapid pace. Yet there is an apparent gap between the advocacy of social-ecological resilience in scientific literature and its take-up in policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other. This paper explores this gap by developing a performative account of how social-ecological resilience is dealt with in practice through case study analysis of how protection of biodiversity was negotiated in response to Melbourne’s recent metropolitan planning initiative. It is suggested that a performative account expands the possible opportunities for governing for social-ecological resilience beyond the concept’s use as a metaphor, measurement, cognitive frame or programmatic statement of adaptive management/co-management and has the potential to emerge through what has been called the everyday ‘mangle of practice’ in response to social-ecological feedback inherent to policy processes.
... To study the requisite means to deal with somewhat anticipated but not exactly known future crises, we engage here in a wideranging discussion across a variety of disciplines on resilience as a predominant logic of governing and managing social-ecological systems (e.g., Holling 1973, Adger et al. 2005, Folke 2006, Brand and Jax 2007, Folke et al. 2010, Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015, Soininen et al. 2024. In short, resilience refers to the capacity to maintain the central functions of systems following a disruption by absorbing or recovering from it (Holling 1973, Folke 2006. ...
... Resilience can come to mean a host of practices that aim to prevent, mitigate, withstand, anticipate, adapt to, or even fully transform to survive and recover from disturbances (Folke et al. 2010, Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015, Simon and Randalls 2016, Soininen et al. 2024. ...
... Since then, the concept has covered much more ground, however, most notably to include social systems into the ecological realm and thus forming hybrids whose abilities to maintain their essential features are interlinked (Adger et al. 2005, Folke 2006). In contemporary analytical understanding, resilience is treated more broadly as a logic, a way of thinking, or a policy discourse that describes a characteristic of a system (Folke 2016) and that is deployed in a variety of contexts, such as security (Aradau 2014, Folkers 2018 or urban governance (Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015). Such approaches share considerable affinities with scholarship on preparedness for and anticipation of crisis-prone futures (e.g., Collier 2008, Roe and Schulman 2015, Lakoff 2017, Deville and Guggenheim 2018, Aykut et al. 2019, Samimian-Darash and Rotem 2019, Keck 2020, Folkers 2021. ...
... The effects of risks are locally felt so resilience needs to be built regionally through policy frameworks shaping action on many challenges, including climate change and chronic inequality. To date, few studies have examined alternative modes of resilience governance, which is pivotal to narrowing the 'resilience implementation gap' (Coaffee et al., 2018;Fastiggi et al., 2021;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). Soft spaces offer a valuable conceptual and empirical framing for addressing this lacuna, both in illuminating tensions and pathways on how to progress resilience implementation. ...
... Finally, strategic coordination at the regional scale is critical to resilience implementation (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). To illustrate in relation to the Resilient Melbourne Strategy, given the absence of a metropolitan governance structure bridging multiple local authority areas, a platform for cross-sectoral and cross-scale governance was instituted as a governance experiment to support strategy delivery (Fastenrath & Coenen, 2021). ...
... When coordination fails within networks dealing with disruptions, accountability challenges may arise with disastrous outcomes. With few studies examining alternative modes of resilience governance (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015), we adopt soft spaces as a novel perspective. ...
A soft spaces lens enables a nuanced perspective on regional resilience governance to disruptions. Focusing on COVID-19, this article illuminates comparative insights on resilience governance in England and how the regional soft spaces of Local Resilience Forums differentially experienced this momentous disruptive event. The pandemic has exposed the limited ability of these regional soft spaces to enhance resilience to disruptions and thus narrow the resilience implementation gap. This article contributes to theory and practice on the tensions and opportunities to progress resilience governance through regional soft spaces amid an evolving policy landscape post-pandemic.
... The studies that have analyzed (inter-)actions of governance, sometimes referred to as the micro-level, have taught us several lessons. Multiple studies have exposed the pragmatic nature of governing, to "get things done", which is often only loosely coupled or even uncoupled from formalized governance agreements, theories, or regulatory requirements (Blanco et al., 2014;Carter, 2018;Huising & Silbey, 2011;Lindsey, 2014;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). In some studies, governance actors are shown to manage or reconcile the gap between regulatory expectations and everyday governing work, while largely maintaining structural governance arrangements (Huising & Silbey, 2011;Klenk, 2020;Schwabenland & Hirst, 2020). ...
... In some studies, governance actors are shown to manage or reconcile the gap between regulatory expectations and everyday governing work, while largely maintaining structural governance arrangements (Huising & Silbey, 2011;Klenk, 2020;Schwabenland & Hirst, 2020). Yet, in others, actors achieve more fundamental change, disrupting or creating governance structures, sometimes formally encouraged by frameworks of adaptive governance (van de Bovenkamp et al., 2017;Van Erp et al., 2020;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). ...
... All in all, studies have shown that the practice of governance is often far removed from its ideal, and that maintaining it requires work. To better understand the everyday dynamics of specifically responsive forms of governance, it is necessary to systematically analyze its particular everyday (inter-)actions (Stout et al., 2018;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). ...
Scholars of responsive forms of governance tend to analyze agreements, arrangements, and architectures. Yet, these forms of governance also require actual actors to act and interact, something that has been scarcely empirically studied. Taking a practice‐theoretical approach, I explore how responsive governance is accomplished in and through meetings. This study is based on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis of governance of child and family services in the Netherlands. It contributes to our current understanding of responsive forms of governance by situating its everyday practice in meetings. A second contribution can be found in the thorough analysis of its everyday practices, with actors continuously calibrating tasks, performance, scope, and authority. Third, this study develops an understanding of how practices of responsive governance relate to structural governance arrangements, exposing how structural contours can be challenged and changed, while other actions result in changes that remain invisible.
... Researchers have highlighted the importance of scale to the governance of resilience (Beilin & Wilkinson, 2015;Chelleri et al., 2015;Meerow & Newell, 2019) and have shown the necessity and practical difficulties of mobilizing multiple stakeholders and diverse tools (regulatory, fiscal, budgetary etc.) in order to build up resilience capacities at metro-regional scale (Coaffee et al., 2018;Davidson et al., 2019;. In this vein, some writers have suggested a practice-based approach as a productive path for research, focusing on how UR is enacted by planners and other practitioners and analyzing actually existing governance arrangements (Vitale et al., 2020;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015;Wilkinson et al., 2010). ...
... Such governance challenges of the fragmented metropolis are therefore critical for effective and equitable UR policy. In the last decade, research has highlighted the importance of a systemic approach to govern resilience in complex metropolitan regions (Steele & Gleeson, 2010;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). This parallels the growing attention given to cross-municipal cooperation to address sustainability and environmental governance concerns (Rosan, 2016;Thiers et al., 2018). ...
This article addresses theoretical and policy challenges for governing urban resilience in fragmented metropolitan regions. By analyzing practical approaches manifested in plans and infrastructure projects in the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Region, we develop an innovative typology of urban resilience governance attuned to metropolitan scale and complexity. Based on analysis of policy documents and interviews with stakeholders in three case studies – Tel Aviv’s City Resilience Plan, Yarqon River Restoration Project, Ayalon Fourth Railway Project – we outline three distinct modalities: Glocal Resilience relates to methodologies promoted by global networks (particularly 100 Resilient Cities) and applied locally by cities, increasing metropolitan disparities; Green Resilience encompasses urban-natural ecosystems and facilitates cross-metropolitan cooperation between multiple stakeholders. Gray Resilience relates to large urban-infrastructural systems and operates through centralized control with limited metropolitan outreach. Together, our typology of Glocal, Green, and Gray Resilience captures the diversity of actually-existing urban resilience governance at metropolitan scale.
Highlights
• Fragmented metropolitan regions are a key challenge for governing urban resilience
• We outline three modalities of metropolitan scale resilience governance
• Glocal: boosts city resilience locally but increases disparities in metro-region
• Green: collaborative yet fragile cross-metropolitan governance of ecosystems
• Gray: centralized governance of infrastructure impedes metropolitan cooperation
... El caso más conspicuo es el de los Objetivos del Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS), cuyo objetivo 11 llama a "Lograr que las ciudades sean más inclusivas, seguras, resilientes y sostenibles". Con la dosis de ambigüedad que caracteriza al discurso político, también se hace uso frecuente como sustantivo (resiliencia) o adjetivo (resiliente) deseable en el uso de funcionarios y políticos (Baggio, Brown, y Hellebrandt 2015;Wagenaar y Wilkinson 2015). ...
... En contraste, en la literatura académica hay un notoriamente abundante e intenso debate sobre el significado de resiliencia y sus implicaciones de política pública (Adger et al. 2002;Folke 2006;Meerow y Newell 2019;Meerow, Newell, y Stults 2016;Moser et al. 2019;Wagenaar y Wilkinson 2015;Walker et al. 2004;Walker y Salt 2012;Wilkinson 2012). Antes del debate actual, el concepto de resiliencia cobró fuerza durante la década de 1970 en relación con la capacidad de un ecosistema de regresar a las condiciones existentes previo a una perturbación, y la literatura ecológica ha transformado el concepto en la capacidad de adaptación, ya sea a través de la autoorganización o de planear una serie de intervenciones para llegar a un nuevo equilibrio (Holling 1973;Walker et al. 2004). ...
La administración del espacio público requiere de una administra-ción pública capaz de mantener o incluso mejorar sus funciones esen-ciales durante perturbaciones relacionadas con el cambio climático, desastres naturales o pandemias, entre otros eventos que se enfren-tarán de manera recurrente en las ciudades de México. La respuesta requiere de capacidad de adaptación ante una perturbación median-te políticas públicas flexibles, innovadoras y basadas en procesos de aprendizaje, entre otras características que incluye el concepto de go-bernanza adaptativa para la resiliencia urbana. La administración de los parques y bosques urbanos requiere transformarse para contribuir a enfrentar los retos urbanos por venir. En este artículo se discute que la crisis por COVID-19, durante la cual se pusieron medidas de distanciamiento social que restringió el acceso a áreas verdes urbanas, reveló que la gestión de las áreas ver-des urbanas en México (con importantes excepciones) está (1) basada predominantemente en un paradigma de recreación y mantenimiento, (2) la administración y planeación no tienen una visión de sistema de parques, y (3) tiene escasa vinculación con las demandas existen-tes de la ciudadanía, la cual tiene poco involucramiento en la toma de decisiones. Por lo anterior, la administración actual, en todos los niveles de gobierno, requiere cambios sustanciales para adaptarse e instrumentar las innovaciones que requiere la aspiración de construir ciudades capaces de administrar una crisis y mantener sus funciones. Para construir tales capacidades, se discute el paradigma de gober-nanza ambiental adaptativa como condición para la construcción de ciudades resilientes, aplicado a la administración de parques urbanos en México.
... Adger (2006) and suggest that decision-makers are primarily concerned with their personal short-term interests, rather than the long-term benefit of the most vulnerable. Who makes the decisions (often at a particular jurisdictional scale) thus shapes whose resilience is prioritized over what time scale (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). 4 Who is included and excluded from the urban system of focus? ...
... Thinking through questions of resilience for whom entails considering potential trade-offs between stakeholders (Fabinyi, 2008). As Wagenaar and Wilkinson (2015) observed in their case study of Melbourne, planning for resilience is inherently a struggle. ...
In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resilience have been ignored and stress the importance of asking "resili-ence of what, to what, and for whom?" This paper calls for careful consideration of not just resilience for whom and what, but also where, when, and why. A three-phase process is introduced to enable these "five Ws" to be negotiated collectively and to engender critical reflection on the politics of urban resilience as plans, initiatives, and projects are conceived, discussed, and implemented. Deployed through the hypothetical case of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, the paper concludes by illustrating how resilience planning trade-offs and decisions affect outcomes over space and time, often with significant implications for equity.
... El caso más conspicuo es el de los Objetivos del Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS), cuyo objetivo 11 llama a "Lograr que las ciudades sean más inclusivas, seguras, resilientes y sostenibles". Con la dosis de ambigüedad que caracteriza al discurso político, también se hace uso frecuente como sustantivo (resiliencia) o adjetivo (resiliente) deseable en el uso de funcionarios y políticos (Baggio, Brown, y Hellebrandt 2015;Wagenaar y Wilkinson 2015). ...
... En contraste, en la literatura académica hay un notoriamente abundante e intenso debate sobre el significado de resiliencia y sus implicaciones de política pública (Adger et al. 2002;Folke 2006;Meerow y Newell 2019;Meerow, Newell, y Stults 2016;Moser et al. 2019;Wagenaar y Wilkinson 2015;Walker et al. 2004;Walker y Salt 2012;Wilkinson 2012). Antes del debate actual, el concepto de resiliencia cobró fuerza durante la década de 1970 en relación con la capacidad de un ecosistema de regresar a las condiciones existentes previo a una perturbación, y la literatura ecológica ha transformado el concepto en la capacidad de adaptación, ya sea a través de la autoorganización o de planear una serie de intervenciones para llegar a un nuevo equilibrio (Holling 1973;Walker et al. 2004). ...
Existe mucho escrito sobre las interacciones de la ciudadanía con la burocracia y las barreras administrativas que las personas enfren- tan. Sin embargo, existen otras barreras sobre las que queremos es- cribir en medio de la pandemia del COVID- 19: las emocionales. Nos asusta pensar que si, en general, el vínculo con el Estado es angustian- te, en una pandemia, puede convertirse en una película de terror. Es por eso por lo que el objetivo de este capítulo es explorar el rol de las emociones en el vínculo con el Estado.
... Urban resilience has been fostered by international institutions and city associations, including the OECD [18,19], UN [20], and the Rockefeller Foundation [21]. However, currently, only a few cities worldwide have designed a comprehensive resilience strategy, and even fewer have developed reporting to inform citizens and document the accountability concerning their resilience actions. ...
... It provides an excellent manual to identify priorities and plan crucial areas of intervention and key goals to reach. However, it is still based on the traditional physical idea of the urban system [20]. ...
Recently, a new paradigm has emerged—the resilient city. It is an evolutionary concept rooted in recent—but more consolidated—city visions, such as a smart city or a sustainable city, from which it inherits the interweaving of different dimensions. This paper investigates the factors behind effective resilience reporting, as well as how a city should draw up an urban resilience strategy report to be accountable to its citizens. We first highlighted the main factors to design and implement reporting for the achievement of strategic resilience goals, by combining research on a resilient city and accountability practices. These factors could be organized following two different perspectives: political and sociotechnical. Then, we applied our framework to four pioneering municipalities selected as paradigmatic case studies. A qualitative content analysis applied to the city resilience reports has provided depth to our framework. We found that the “weak factor” is the ability to embed the resilience strategy in rooted connections and transform itself into an ecosystem that crosscuts different sectoral urban processes. Our exploratory research claims could be used for future research in this field, as cities are becoming increasingly complex systems, where the quality of life and well-being of a larger population depends.
... We found that our work in the San Francisco Bay Area could be augmented by incorporating more resilience thinking in the form of considering management impacts on ecosystem services, and more generally considering socioecological feedback loops in the urban system. This points to the difficulty of operationalizing resilience thinking, which is well documented (Wagenaar and Wilkinson, 2015;Crowe et al., 2016;Hernantes et al., 2019;Meerow and Newell, 2019). Current practice is still hindered by the different meanings that different communities-engineering, ecological, or socialecological-associate with the concept (Quinlan et al., 2015;Meerow et al., 2016). ...
... Understanding and ultimately transforming urban systems' dynamics through natural infrastructure requires long-term engagement and trust, which means investments in time and capacity. A downside of the resilience thinking principles is that planners and managers often do not have the resources to apply resilience approaches and grapple with complexity (Quinlan et al., 2015;Wagenaar and Wilkinson, 2015;Meerow et al., 2016;Hernantes et al., 2019). Whether this is due to a low amount of resources or a misallocation of these resources (assuming that understanding system's dynamics or applying adaptive management will be easy), it results in a missed opportunity to leverage insights of resilience thinking in practice. ...
Globally, cities face massive environmental and societal challenges such as rapid population growth and climate change. In response, natural infrastructure is increasingly recognized for its potential to enhance resilience and improve human well-being. Here, we examine the role of the ecosystem services and resilience approaches in urban planning, which both aim to sustain the long-term benefits of natural infrastructure in cities. While the two approaches are intertwined and share deep roots in social-ecological systems framing, they confer complementary strengths in practice, which we illustrate with a case study in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States. We show that, at present, the main strength of ecosystem service practice is to provide actionable information, while urban resilience practice supports the development of holistic long-term strategies. We discuss operational limitations of both approaches and suggest that understanding and leveraging their complementary strengths could help bridge the implementation gap between research and practice in urban natural infrastructure planning.
... Adger (2006) and suggest that decision-makers are primarily concerned with their personal short-term interests, rather than the long-term benefit of the most vulnerable. Who makes the decisions (often at a particular jurisdictional scale) thus shapes whose resilience is prioritized over what time scale (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). 4 Who is included and excluded from the urban system of focus? ...
... Thinking through questions of resilience for whom entails considering potential trade-offs between stakeholders (Fabinyi, 2008). As Wagenaar and Wilkinson (2015) observed in their case study of Melbourne, planning for resilience is inherently a struggle. ...
... We believe that there is a need for further studies of how "sustainability" is performed in various contexts. Understanding how sustainability is made sense of in relation to the context in which it is used will lead to more a comprehensive and transformative understanding of the concept (Guthey et al., 2014), not only by helping understanding gaps between ideal and practice (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2013), and in relation to the "postsustainable trilemma" (sic Sconfienza, 2019), but also by equipping us with the possibility of evoking the performative effects of language in order to stimulate change (Wickert & Schaefer, 2014). ...
... : the urban development district Stockholm Royal Seaport (SRS; Swe: "Norra Djurgårdsstaden") in Sweden. The urban development context is particularly suitable when it comes to understanding the social, economic, and ecological dynamics that shape or retard the transition towards a more sustainable future (cf.Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2013) and SRS is a good example of the ambition expressed in urban planning in general, where urban districts-particularly cities-on an overall level are seen as important tools for enhancing sustainability(Wheeler & Beatley, 2014).SRS is a large urban development district that involves the reconstruction of a former sea-front harbor area that used to house a large ferry terminal, an oil terminal, and several oil and gas storage tanks.When completed in 2030, SRS will house 10,000 new homes as well as workplaces for some 30,000 people; several restaurants, bars and cafés, shops, gyms, theaters, a hotel, and a conference center.The initial discussions about SRS took place already before the turn of the millennium, and the first residential houses were designedin 2011. In 2013, the first inhabitants and tenants moved in. ...
Our purpose is to explore the concept of “sustainability” when understood from a performative perspective, i.e. as a concept that is filled with meaning across time. Drawing on a 10 year‐long study of the digital footprint of Stockholm Royal Seaport, claimed to be northern Europe's largest sustainable urban development district, we show that “sustainability” emerged as the project became associated with particular places, projects, histories, and technologies. This means that “sustainability” was local in that it was situated in the particular spatial context of the project; temporal in that it was situated in a particular time; and political in that it expressed particular values and perspectives. The study contributes to explaining why “sustainability” remains—and always will remain—a contested concept, which is why sustainability transitions are complex. Consequently, we suggest that the transition towards sustainability always involves the transition of sustainability, something that needs to be acknowledged in order for a transition to actually become sustainable.
... En las últimas décadas, la resiliencia se ha convertido en un concepto complejo, multidisciplinar y con diversas acepciones, que ha adquirido un interés exponencial en el ámbito académico y práctico, entre ellos, en el planeamiento espacial y en las políticas urbanas (Moser et al., 2019). A pesar de esta demanda, las investigaciones prácticas de la resiliencia en estas disciplinas aún son modestas, debido a que pocos estudios han analizado su aplicación en entornos reales y evaluado los resultados de forma empírica (Ribeiro y Gonçalves, 2019;Hewitt et al., 2019;Wagenaar y Wilkinson, 2015). ...
La resiliència en l’àmbit de la planificació espacial contribueix al desenvolupament sostenible dels sistemes socioespacials i afronta els efectes imprevisibles del canvi climàtic en les àrees urbanes. Aquest article analitza l’arquitectura resilient mitjançant la comparació de dos casos d’estudi: els antics complexos industrials transformats en equipaments socioculturals de la Cable Factory a Hèlsinki i de Can Batlló a Barcelona. Mitjançant una metodologia de teoria fonamentada, aquesta investigació combina tres mètodes inductius per a la recopilació de dades: entrevistes semiestructurades, recerca observacional i recerca secundària. L’objectiu del treball és definir unes propietats i característiques que facilitin la construcció d’un marc teòric en arquitectura resilient des d’un enfocament de resiliència evolutiva i, així, contribuir a la projecció de ciutats resilients. Gràcies a la planificació de la indeterminació espacial, s’identifiquen les propietats resilients de persistència, adaptació i transformació en els sistemes arquitectònics d’ambdós casos. Els resultats mostren 16 característiques resilients que s’integren en les dimensions espacial, social i temporal. Així mateix, es distingeixen dues categories d’espai indeterminat: l’espai en brut a la Cable Factory i l’espai-lliure a Can Batlló. Es conclou que els espais indeterminats ofereixen llibertat d’apropiació i permeten afrontar l’obsolescència i el canvi d’ús mitjançant la possibilitat d’evolució i la flexibilitat.
Resilience in the field of spatial planning contributes to the sustainable development of socio-spatial systems and deals with the unpredictable effects of climate change in urban areas. This article discusses resilient architecture by comparing two case studies: the former industrial complexes transformed into sociocultural facilities of the Cable Factory in Helsinki and Can Batlló in Barcelona. Through a grounded theory methodology, this research combines three inductive methods to collect data: semi-structured interviews, observational research, and secondary research. The aim of this work is to define properties and characteristics that promote the creation of a conceptual framework in resilient architecture from an evolutionary resilience approach and, thus, contribute to the projection of resilient cities. Thanks to the planning of spatial indeterminacy, the resilient properties of persistence, adaptation and transformation are identified in the architectural systems of both cases. The results show 16 resilient characteristics that are integrated in the spatial, social and temporal dimensions. Two categories of indeterminate space are also distinguished: raw space at the Cable Factory and freespace at Can Batlló. It is concluded that indeterminate spaces offer freedom of appropriation and confront obsolescence and change of use through evolvability and flexibility.
La resiliencia en el ámbito del planeamiento espacial contribuye al desarrollo sostenible de los sistemas socioespaciales y lidia con los efectos impredecibles del cambio climático en las áreas urbanas. Este artículo debate sobre arquitectura resiliente mediante la comparación de dos casos de estudio: los antiguos complejos industriales transformados en equipamientos socioculturales de la Cable Factory en Helsinki y de Can Batlló en Barcelona. Mediante una metodología de teoría fundamentada, esta investigación combina tres métodos inductivos para recopilar los datos de estudio: entrevistas semiestructuradas, investigación observacional e investigación secundaria. El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en definir unas propiedades y características, que propicien la construcción de un marco teórico en la arquitectura resiliente desde un enfoque de resiliencia evolutiva y, con ello, contribuir a la proyección de ciudades resilientes. Gracias a la planificación de la indeterminación espacial, se identifican las propiedades resilientes de persistencia, adaptación y transformación en los sistemas arquitectónicos de ambos casos. Los resultados muestran 16 características resilientes que se integran en las dimensiones espacial, social y temporal. Asimismo, se distinguen dos categorías de espacio indeterminado, esto es, el espacio en bruto en la Cable Factory y el espacio-libre en Can Batlló. Se concluye que los espacios indeterminados ofrecen libertad de apropiación y afrontan la obsolescencia y el cambio de uso mediante la evolucionabilidad y la flexibilidad.
... Research economic diversification, utilizing technology and innovation, and fortifying governance structures and collaborations [53,63,64]. Governance for urban resilience involves grappling with implementing a complex adaptive systems viewthe world within real-world institutional and ecological-environments, emphasizing the importance of multi-scale governance for successful urban resilience governance [55,65]. Promoting urban resilience requires effective governance frameworks, which include participatory governance and transparent decision-making procedures [66]. ...
Climate change has contributed to an increase in natural catastrophes over the past five years in Indonesia, causing various forms of damage in urban areas and posing a severe danger to multi-risk governance for municipal governments in Indonesia. This study explores how multi-risk governance strategies encourage sustainable adaptation to climate change and increase urban resilience in Bandung and Makassar City, Indonesia. This study method uses a qualitative-exploratory approach with a case study in two (2) climate-vulnerable cities in Indonesia. Data analysis uses qualitative-interactive analysis. The results of this study show that the impact of climate change in Bandung and Makassar City, Indonesia has caused an increase in the potential for erosion, reduced wetlands along the coast, an increase in the rate of seawater intrusion, a decrease in food production, damage to infrastructure, a reduction in clean water sources, an increase in disease. respiratory, floods, droughts, and other hydrological disasters. This has resulted in many climate approaches and actions being taken to respond to the impact of climate change in Indonesia (Bandung and Makassar City), the results of which are still not optimal to date. This study suggests a sustainable adaptation approach to climate action in Bandung and Makassar City which prioritizes social justice and environmental integrity so that it has a real impact on community vulnerability and environmental damage due to the impacts of climate change. The contribution of this study provides sufficient insight into the institutional approaches and adaptive sustainability measures needed to promote resilience in Indonesia. At the same time, this study will be a useful reference in future research on multi-risk governance and sustainable adaptation strategy for climate action and enhancing urban governance.
... It therefore became necessary to connect nexus governance constraints with relevant governance theory [1,4,34]. Specialised governance units focusing especially on monitorisation and analysis, in parallel with broadened participation, are of critical importance for enabling collaborative and adaptive nexus governance (due to the ability to link governance units through shared information) [35][36][37][38]. Therefore, what is needed is a nexus-oriented decision support system (DSS) [39]. ...
The water–energy–food (WEF) nexus is recognised globally as a framework for sustainable resource management and a potential tool for building resilient social-ecological systems (SES). To verify this, we used a transdisciplinary approach to explore how the WEF nexus approach is understood theoretically and practically. The analysis indicated a disparity in how the WEF nexus framework is understood and conceptualised in theory, and the practical implementation of the framework. Given this, the study found it challenging to validate the WEF nexus as a supporting tool for building SES resilience. In line with this, this study argues for a deeper exploration of the practical implementation of the WEF nexus framework in planning, governance and social processes. As such, the study analysed the governance and management systems of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (V&A), a precinct in Cape Town that adopted the WEF nexus approach for sustainable management of water, energy, food and waste resources. Using the analysis of V&A Waterfront’s management practices—including the use of the Global Carbon Exchange (GCX) system—from a practical, social and governance perspective, the aim was to understand whether a bridge between WEF nexus theory and governance practice impacts the practical ability to govern for SES resilience. Findings suggest that the nexus governance approach at the V&A Waterfront has implications that strengthen the capacity to govern for SES resilience in the V&A Waterfront context. The conclusion is then made that the nexus governance approach also strengthens the capacity to govern for SES resilience in the Cape Town context. Results also suggest the most crucial element for the success of the nexus governance approach is a material flow analysis (MFA)-based decision support system (DSS) exemplified by GCX Data Analytics Sustainability Hub (DASH-).
... Studies have argued that the concept of resilience might be overreaching, losing its meaning, and becoming an "empty signifier" 19,20,84 . Such overreaching goals often ignore inter-city inequality, including the differences among cities, as the results suggested; this inequality includes different classes, administration versus citizens, and isolated and vulnerable groups, as has already been argued [85][86][87] . Instead of accomplishing these larger goals, building "baseline resilience" could be possible in most cities and would cost-effectively address the above challenges. ...
Understanding the impacts of COVID-19 on citizens from different cities is crucial for urban resilience-building and reducing inequal resilience distribution. However, little research focuses on urban life at the individual level, particularly in second- and third-tier cities. An online survey was therefore conducted to collect data on how COVID-19 affected the cities and urban residents in mainland China. The results indicate that COVID-19 limited citizens’ access to healthcare facilities and socioeconomic activities apart from the immediate health crisis. Most citizens suffered reduced income, unemployment, and social anxiety. However, COVID-19 also raised social awareness and actions for disaster adaptation. The Chinese pandemic management has strengthened governmental leadership and credibility among most citizens in the early stage. Importantly, the results suggested that citizens in first-tier cities appeared more resilient to pandemics than those in second-tier cities. A networked resilience framework was therefore discussed for resilience-building policy implications.
... The study of practices shows how actors 'get things done', despite formalised governance agreements, theories, or regulatory requirements (e.g. Huising and Silbey, 2011;Wagenaar and Wilkinson, 2015). The practice turn centralises what actors say, do, and feel when they engage with one another (e.g. ...
Collaborative approaches to governance, policymaking, and administration are believed to provide means of adequately handling wicked problems. Simultaneously, many scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of collaboration in practice. In this article, we argue that understanding the ‘small’ practices of collaborative governance and actor-positioning processes illuminates why collaborative governance is such a challenging response to wicked problems. Instead of focussing on ‘big’ collaborative approaches to ‘big’ wicked problems, zooming in on mundane dynamics demonstrates the continuous work that governing and positioning processes require, exposing the provisional nature of elements that have been argued to be vital, such as mutual trust, reciprocity, long-term commitment, authority, or autonomy. Lastly, the mundane uncovers the importance of the material, spatial, and temporal organisation of actor-positioning processes and the potential of language to inhibit or enable collaborative governance. The article ends with a reflection on how analyses of mundane dynamics may help scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and citizens to understand their own processes of engagements in collaborative endeavours and possibly temper expectations.
... Concepts such as urban resilience and ecological resilience have been regularly proposed for exploring urban ecological risk issues. 9 While some scholars have explored strategies to enhance urban ecological risk-coping capacity through the lens of disaster resilience, it is crucial to note that ER differs from disaster resilience, which focuses on a city's ability to prevent and mitigate disasters, 10 and ecosystem resilience, which accentuates system vulnerability and resilience. 11 Moreover, ER differs from environmental absorptive capacity, which emphasizes the natural environment's ability to absorb and mitigate risks. ...
Existing research on the state transition process of ecological resilience (ER) has neglected the ultimate goal of enhancing well-being and lacks theoretical framework support. To address these issues, we have innovatively developed a three-dimensional analysis framework of "resistant, absorptive, and restorative capacity" to measure ER. We also explored the regional unevenness and factors influencing ER at the provincial level in China through spatiotemporal evolution analysis and GeoDetector models. The results indicate that: the ecological resilience of Chinese provinces ranges from 0.415 to 0.596, with all provinces falling into the risk or good areas. Furthermore, a fluctuating and increasing trend is observed. The eastern coastal provinces, such as Beijing and Shandong, comprise predominantly good areas of ecological resilience that are distributed in a band manner, while the western provinces, notably Xinjiang, comprise primarily risk areas distributed in a clustered pattern. The per capita electricity consumption, per capita GDP, and patent applications in high-tech industries are identified as the primary factors influencing the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of ecological resilience, and the interaction effects of each factor have synergistic enhancement effects. Spatial ecological resilience displays certain degrees of "nonhomogeneous" agglomeration and spatial heterogeneity. However, no apparent spatial polarization phenomenon is observed. These findings provide valuable insights for cities aiming to address ecological risks and enhance urban resilience.
... Among these, the most prevalent is the comprehensive index evaluation. This method utilizes index weights determined by expert scoring [61], the Analytic Hierarchy Process method [44], and the entropy method [45]. In this study, the entropy evaluation method, with the advantage of providing a more objective evaluation, was selected for constructing an urban resilience evaluation model and providing comprehensive scores of urban resilience in the 31 provinces of China based on indices detailed in Table 1. ...
In the current era, as modern cities increasingly face environmental disasters and inherent challenges, the creation and enhancement of resilient cities have become critical. China’s urban resilience exhibits significant imbalances and inadequacies at the provincial level. This study delves into the evolution of urban resilience in various Chinese provinces, offering valuable insights for building and nurturing resilient cities. Initially, a comprehensive evaluation system for China’s urban resilience was established, incorporating 24 indicators across three key resilience aspects: resistance, adaptability, and recovery. The entropy weight method was used to develop an urban resilience evaluation model, and the Moran index and spatial cold–hot-spot analysis were applied to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban resilience across China’s 31 provinces from 2012 to 2021. Moreover, the geographically and temporally weighted regression model was employed to analyze the spatial distribution of factors affecting urban resilience. The results show a general upward trend in urban resilience across Chinese provinces, with notable regional differences and concentrations. A significant decrease in urban resilience is observed from southeastern coastal cities to inland regions. The regression model highlights spatial variations in the impact of different factors, with the same factor having varying effects in different provinces. This research provides a thorough understanding of the factors influencing urban resilience in China, contributing to both theoretical and practical discussions on the topic. It lays a strong scientific groundwork for the development and advancement of resilient cities in China.
... When summarizing essential resilience issues, Boštjan Kerbler picks six items (2016): spatial planning for climate change, restructuring of post-communist cities, revitalisation of parks and open spaces, role of migrants in transforming neighbourhoods, gated communities and intergenerational living. In the final analysis the issue is about finding the apt spatial level to formulate and review the goals of resilience policy -a relatively well-researched topic already (Coaffee, 2013;Johnson and Blackburn, 2014;Bandyopadhyay and Philip, 2015;Chelleri et al., 2015;Wagenaar and Wilkinson, 2015;Keller et al., 2017). ...
Many recent catastrophes have necessitated ever more innovative approaches to prepare for resilient urban areas and city regions. In contrast to sustainability, a more established concept in research on the built environment, resilience refers to how to manage an unsustainable situation at a predominantly local level. While natural hazards, epidemics and armed conflicts make up the core of resilience research, also social hazards require some attention: hitherto the spectre of socioeconomic factors, demographics, and institutions herein can be considered neglected topics (in relative terms). This study deliberates on the current discourse surrounding these matters from a realist perspective. Additionally, it argues for a potential social innovation in the form of a localized, socioeconomic and demographic urban resilience index. The importance of real estate situations within local and regional governance circumstances is highlighted as it is central to the argumentation and proposed research strategy.
... Likewise, achieving long-term resilience targets comes at the cost of short-term ones [192]. These aforementioned potential negative consequences and trade-offs illustrate that "planning for resilience is inherently a struggle" ( [194], as cited in [16], p. 9) and confirm earlier arguments in the literature regarding the importance of thinking through questions related to who, what, when, where and why, if resilience is to be effectively operationalized. ...
The concept of resilience was only recently introduced into urban studies to address the complexity and future uncertainty in cities. In particular, the interest in better understanding how it can be integrated into studying urban form—as the raw material of urban planning/design and key for the sustainability of cities—has been growing. However, resilience is a polysemic concept with different meanings/interpretations, which creates ambiguity and challenges in its operationalization. This paper resolves this issue through a systematic review of 106 peer-reviewed publications guided by recurring questions in the literature (e.g., resilience of/through what? To what? For whom? How? When? Where?). The results showed that the urban form–resilience relationship is complex, where many urban form elements can influence resilience to a great many disturbances (general/specified). In facing these disturbances, urban form exhibits different performances (i.e., persistence, adaptability and transformability) and where it can be either persistent/adaptable/transformable itself or can enhance people’s persistence/adaptation capacities. The review also showed that there are many actors for urban form resilience and potential trade-offs. Finally, an overview of existing definitions of urban form resilience is provided to improve clarity in the field, and examples of general urban planning/design recommendations were formulated to enhance the resilience of different urban form elements.
... The second aspect is about the spatial operation of rural revitalization. Spatial resilience theory holds the potential to serve as a management paradigm, but its challenge lies in the gaps of spatial resilience discourse and practice [89]. Through our discussion of the mechanisms of the configurations with respect to the case villages, it is evident that spatial resilience could furnish both a theoretical framework and practical foundation for rural development. ...
In the process of rapid urbanization in China, rural areas are facing increasingly complex changes and challenges. Resilience theory provides a multidimensional perspective of the sustainable development of rural regions. As a subset of the broader resilience framework, spatial resilience focuses on inter-component relationships and systematic characteristics at the spatial level. It projects the potential of resilience theory into the spatial domain of human habitats. This paper endeavors to integrate spatial resilience theory into the field of rural built environments. At the village level, relevant factors were extracted, and an exploratory analysis focusing on rural spatial resilience was conducted. Twenty-one villages in southern Jiangsu at various resilience levels were selected as empirical cases. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was employed to identify four configurations with sufficient conditions for rural spatial resilience. Furthermore, through an analysis of typical villages, the effective mechanisms of the relevant resilience factors were also elucidated. Our findings reveal several key points: (1) rural spatial resilience relies on an optimal combination of multiple factors rather than a single factor; (2) there are multiple potential pathways through which to enhance rural resilience; (3) and the configuration analysis of the rural factors of spatial resilience helps to narrow the distance between spatial resilience theory and spatial practice. This study validates and refines the application of spatial resilience theory in the context of the rural built environment. Corresponding suggestions are proposed for building a resilient countryside, aiming to provide support and reference for future development strategies in rural areas.
... In addition, the majority of 100RC's urban resilience actions present in these new strategies were also regarded as governance experiments, as they trialled and tested new ways of governance through urban innovation and collaboration . In examining the institutionalisation of 100RC's governance experiments, this paper contributes to calls from international scholars to better understand the prospects of networked experimentation for challenging or altering the status quo of entrenched urban planning and policy frameworks (Davidson & Brendan, 2018;Moloney & Doyon, 2021;Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2015). Additionally, given the cessation of 100RC in 2019, this paper also contributes to assessing the network's outcomes, strengths, weaknesses, and inform lessons learnt from 100RC for other city networks. ...
This paper investigates the institutionalisation of 100 Resilient Cities [100RC] governance experiments in cities that lack a metropolitan government. In examining this phenomenon, the research develops a novel analytical framework that builds upon the ‘beyond experiments’ literature and two conceptual foundations: the role of urban governance context, particularly cities lacking a metropolitan government, and the role of transnational city networks. The framework is then applied to review the case study of Living Melbourne (Resilient Melbourne) – a 100RC governance experiment implemented in Melbourne, Australia. Key findings show that the institutionalisation of 100RC governance experiments occurs in cities lacking a metropolitan government by generating new changes in governance, particularly around two key domains: ways of thinking and ways of organising. The study also reveals that most changes generated via institutionalisation are incremental and reformistic, rarely transformational adjustments that can directly bring about urban sustainability transitions. In addition, this research suggests that the extent of institutionalisation is influenced by three key factors: (1) existing metropolitan governance conditions, (2) internal conditions of governance experiments and (3) city networks (only to a limited extent).
... Some published studies describe the gap between the political discourse and the capacity to govern to build practice resilience (e.g., Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2013;Meerow and Newell 2019). In the same vein, this paper addresses, from an empirical perspective, the relevance of the occurrence of disasters such as the one produced by the EQKS19-2017 and its relationship to the meaning of City resilience from two perspectives. ...
This paper serves as an introduction to focus on the meaning of resilience as a notion that hypothetically enables cities and their citizens to remain unaffected by shocks and stresses of diverse nature, but in practice, is a parsimonious representation of a highly complex human endogenous condition that is often not adequately understood and addressed due to weak or weathered disaster risk governance. Through an empirical analysis, the relevance of the occurrence of disasters such as the one produced by the Mexico City earthquake of September 19, 2017, and its relationship to the meaning of urban resilience is addressed. Since the 100 Resilient Cities program launch in 2013, several cities, including Mexico City, have adopted diverse strategies to build and become more resilient to physical, social, and economic shocks and stresses. Nonetheless, the degree of success of such strategies expressed in everyday life within the cities, regardless of what the official documents report, reveals highly heterogeneous results. In the case of Mexico City, it is evident that the appropriate strategy for attaining the desired outcome of becoming a Resilient City has not been successful. Despite setting the goal of advancing disaster risk reduction through urban and regional planning, the impact of the earthquake of September 19, 2017, proved otherwise.
... Risk perception varies across social groups depending on their socio-economic and political positions. The power to make or influence decisions in a particular administrative process often determines whose risk should or would be prioritized in a given period [90,97]. In southwest Bangladesh, locals often claimed that political leaders and local elites were closely enmeshed in terms of decision-making. ...
... In this regard, Bristow and Healy (2014) highlight how the literature on regional and urban resilience, following a certain tendency towards determinism, risks analysing only the evolution of the system and reaction to shock events through the examination of some variables and indicators. On the contrary, the comprehension of the contribution of the human and institutional components in the dynamics of decline and/or recovery appears fundamental, especially in reaction to internal or hetero-directed processes and stresses to change (Wagenaar and Wilkinson, 2015). ...
... En ce sens, la résilience relève bien de la performativité (Aggeri, 2017), entendue comme le fait que la réalité est produite par notre engagement pratique dans le monde (Wagenaar & Wilkinson, 2013 La fabrique de la résilience dans les territoires urbains, donne finalement, au fur et à mesure, un contenu concret à la notion. En ce sens, l'opérationnalisation de la résilience est performative : en cherchant à améliorer la résilience de leur territoire, les acteurs urbains donnent corps à la notion de résilience et la rendent, de fait, opérationnelle. ...
La résilience est devenue un référentiel d'action international, au croisement de la prévention des risques de catastrophes, de la lutte contre le changement climatique et du développement durable. Cela se concrétise par une volonté d'opérationnalisation à l'échelle des villes notamment, où la résilience est portée par de nombreux acteurs urbains et par le niveau étatique. Mais cette volonté se heurte à plusieurs verrous : difficulté méthodologique pour construire des indicateurs robustes de diagnostic et d’évaluation ; articulation des échelles spatiales, temporelles et administratives ; fragmentation des acteurs urbains ; caractère subjectif de la résilience, etc. Malgré cela, nous assistons ces dernières années à l'opérationnalisation de la résilience. Cette recherche propose de comprendre la résilience en tant que concept scientifique, notamment dans le champ de la réduction des catastrophes. Elle propose aussi de comprendre pourquoi le concept a été appliqué aux villes et comment les territoires s'approprient et opérationnalisent la résilience urbaine. L'idée défendue de la thèse est que la résilience urbaine est performative dans le sens où elle se fabrique au fur et à mesure de son opérationnalisation par les acteurs urbains. Cette approche a été permise, notamment grâce à l'observation et aux enquêtes menées autours de deux cas d'études : le réseau 100 Resilient Cities de la Fondation Rockefeller et la métropole de Lyon. Ces recherches ont permis d'observer la construction de la résilience urbaine à plusieurs échelles et avec deux approches différentes : bottom-up et top-down.
... Based on the framework, we presented some illustrative examples [Bell et al. (2022)]. We selected the illustrative examples based on three elements:¯rms operating in cities that declared themselves smart, sustainable, or resilient as a consequence of a project they implemented; cities that declared themselves as having planned a process for becoming smart, sustainable, or resilient cities; or international rankings for smartness, sustainability, or resilience proposed by supranational institutions [Wagenaar and Wilkinson (2015)]. Therefore, the sources we collected are taken from o±cial reports and websites and issued by local city authorities,¯rms partnering with the cities, or both. ...
This paper deals with cities’ transformation from the perspectives of smartness, sustainability, and resilience, to stress the contribution of private firms. Indeed, technology providers globally have been observed as being partners of local authorities, mainly with reference to service platforms. To accomplish this aim, we reviewed the literature, considering the most relevant contributions on the themes, to establish an analytical framework; further on, we discussed 15 illustrative case studies — from a wider list — of firms involved in smart, sustainable, and resilient initiatives. The paper offers an analytical framework to merge, consisting of the five key features of smart, sustainable, and resilient cities, and leads to opportunities to further investigate the contribution of firms to cities’ transformation in a new way that embeds multiple perspectives.
... There has been a dramatic increase in the interest in resilience in the science and policy arena in recent years, and there is a continuously growing demand for a practical guide on resilience, especially within the environmental planning and management context, and yet the studies on the practice of resilience remain few ( Sellberg et al., 2018 ). A number of studies have looked at how to apply resilience thinking in the real world ( Baird et al., 2016 ;Mitchell et al., 2014 ;Wagenaar and Wilkinson, 2015 ). Previous studies within this area have concentrated on local and regional scales and have only examined specific one or two local councils or organizations, thus, there have been little efforts to make a synthesis of these case studies ( Sellberg et al., 2018 ). ...
Resilience is a multi-faceted concept that traces its evolution based on the field of discipline wherein it was used. Various researchers have defined the term throughout the years according to their own expertise. This has impacted the development and evolution of the concept and how it was used in each specific discipline. One of the most recent and important use of the term is in the disaster paradigm. This paper traces the evolution of the definition of resilience and narrows it down to the disaster realm, eventually focusing on small islands as a socio-ecological system. It also discusses the relationship of resilience with vulnerability and enumerates the various tools and methods that have been used to measure both concepts. This review also presents an integration which identifies social, economic and ecological resilience as the different facets of disaster resilience of small islands. This paper reveals that there are gaps in defining disaster resilience of small islands through a socio-ecological systems approach. Moreover, there are few studies on using the participatory approach for determining indicators of disaster resilience which contributes to a research-policy gap in resilience studies. The paper recommends a strong future research direction on how to translate research findings into a tool that could help communities at the local level, especially those living in small islands.
... When summarizing essential resilience issues, Boštjan Kerbler picks six items [45]: spatial planning for climate change, restructuring of post-communist cities, revitalisation of parks and open spaces, role of migrants in transforming neighbourhoods, gated communities and intergenerational living. At the end of the day, the issue is about finding the apt spatial level to formulate and review the goals of resilience policy -a relatively well-researched topic already [46][47][48][49][50][51]. ...
... The results of the study highlight some resilience characteristics embedded in human systems for urban resilience governance. The first is multi-scale governance (Paterson et al. 2017;Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015). Urban resilience requires multi-level collaborations across complex boundaries at social, physical, and ecological dimensions (Boyd and Juhola 2015;Li et al. 2020b). ...
Understanding actor collaboration networks and their evolution is essential to promoting collective action in resilience planning and management of interdependent infrastructure systems. Local interactions and choice homophily are two important network evolution mechanisms. Network motifs encode the information of network formation, configuration, and the local structure. Homophily effects, on the other hand, capture whether the network configurations have significant correlations with node properties. The objective of this paper is to explore the extent to which local interactions and homophily effects influence actor collaboration in resilience planning and management of interdependent infrastructure systems. We mapped bipartite actor collaboration network based on a post-Hurricane Harvey stakeholder survey that revealed actor collaborations for hazard mitigation. We examined seven bipartite network motifs for the mapped collaboration network and compared the mapped network to simulated random models with same degree distributions. Then we examined whether the network configurations had significant statistics for node properties using exponential random graph models. The results provide insights about the two mechanisms—local interactions and homophily effect—influencing the formation of actor collaboration in resilience planning and management of interdependent urban systems. The findings have implications for improving network cohesion and actor collaborations from diverse urban sectors.
... However, in North Carolina, only 13 percent of the projects need community coordination, and the level of public support is not high. Finally, the level of the administering government can directly determine which projects are a high priority over what time scale (Meerow and Newell 2019;Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015). Table 2 indicates that county-level governments (55%) and local-level governments (23%) play a more important role than regional-level and state-level governments, probably because they play the first role in responding to hazards and in meeting their constituencies' needs. ...
Rebuilding communities requires an actionable approach to explicitly translate the concept of resilience into postdisaster recovery planning. Through clustering analysis using project titles and project summary, 940 resilience projects are grouped into infrastructure prototypes, economic development prototypes, housing prototypes, and environmental prototypes among the Hurricane Matthew Resilient Redevelopment Plans. This research evaluated the characteristics of all prototypes based on the robustness-rapidity-inclusiveness framework. It also assessed the economic and environmental impacts, community involvement, and governance of identified prototypes. By posing a series of questions for practitioners, this research is a starting point for practitioners to build resilience in postdisaster recovery planning.
... Edimsel perspektiften her gün farklı aktörlerin farklı davranışları kentlerin direncini etkilemektedir. (Wagenaar ve Wilkinson, 2013, s. 1266. ...
Kent planlama anlayışı ve politikalarında geleneksel yöntemlerin, teknik yaklaşımların ve merkeziyetçi anlayışın sonuç üretmedeki yetersizliği ve giderek karmaşıklaşan sorunlara çözüm arayışları politika alanında iş birliğinin önemini artırmaktadır. Kent ile ilgili karar alma sürecinde kentte yaşayanlar giderek daha az söz sahibi olmaktadır. Önceleri ekoloji alanı ile ilişkisel olarak çevre konularında ve afet riskleri bağlamında ele alınan kent direnci kavramının giderek kent ile ilgili daha fazla sorun alanını anlatmak için kullanılması planlama yaklaşımlarında ve kent politika alanında kentsel direncin sağlanmasında nasıl bir yöntem izlenebileceği konusunun daha yakından anlaşılmasını gerektirmektedir. Bu bağlamda çalışmanın amacı, kentlere direnç kazandırılması yolunda uygulanacak planlama anlayışı ve politikalarda izlenecek yöntemde iş birliğinin önemini ortaya koymaktır. Özellikle mekânın üretiminde etkili olan aktörlerin farklılığı ve sayısı göz önüne alındığında söz konusu aktörlerin politika yapım ve uygulama sürecinde iş birliği içerisinde hareket etmesi kentin dirençli olma düzeyini etkileyecektir. Çalışmanın önemi kentsel direnç çalışmalarının ağırlıklı olarak teknik yaklaşımlarla değerlendirilmesinin yetersizliğini kent hakkı tartışmaları ile ilişkilendirerek farklı aktörlerin birlikte hareket etmesinin önemini ortaya koymasıdır. Dirençli bir kent yaratma politikaları aktörler arası iletişim ve iş birliği çerçevesinde kent yönetimleri odağında geliştirilmesi gereken bir çerçeveye sahiptir.
... Regional resource drift [51] iii. Regional resource carrying capacity [16] 3. Urban i. Governance [54] ii. Urban system [3,8] iii. ...
Urban resilience for any city is a gap to be fully understood and assimilated in urban planning. Globalisation and rapid urbanisation in recent years have led to newer challenges as higher densities, greater demand for infrastructure, resources, environmental and man-made hazards are on the increase. Cities are trying to cope up with the rising needs through various planning techniques and modern applications and planning models. However, each city’s landscape is different and many a time, these approaches might not adhere appropriately to every aspect of a city. One of the worst situations where the resilience of a city would be truly realized, is when disaster strikes. The flood in Kerala State in August 2018 is one such example where researchers can study a lot. Not only the fact of ‘coping up to the maximum damage possible’, but it is also ‘how fast human lives can be brought back to their normal stable level’. Once pre-disaster state is achieved, the need to improve services or to continue as usual is another question to be resolved. In most cases, the governmental and other agencies would strive to attain the lowest acceptable condition. However, it is most appreciated if the resilience exceeds the original level with new approaches to planning, design and infrastructural capabilities so that the disaster, even if it strikes again will affect the damage prevention better. The ability of the city or the extent of resilience shown by Kerala is strong, especially when compared to similar scale disasters that have struck in India and even other parts of the world. The paper tries to study and evaluate these factors that lead to faster resilience of Kerala’s state to model a flexible and more effective urban resilient planning approach.
... The landscape attractiveness is their natural consequence. An important contribution of this study is the versatility of this set of indicators which can also be applied to a wide range of fields, such as landscape planning and management, regional and urban planning [48,49], urban resilience [50], cultural heritage [51], siting decisions and local development processes [52,53] or energy planning [54]. It is interesting to highlight that the results coming from the present GAHPSort II application on the UNESCO site of Langhe-Roero and Monferrato confirm the outcomes of previous studies on the same area. ...
In the ongoing context of climate change, there is an increasing need to support decision-making processes in the domain of landscape planning and management. Suitable evaluation techniques are needed to take into account the interests of actors and stakeholders in shared policy decisions. An important methodological contribution to the field is given by the Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), due to its ability to combine multiple aspects of a decision problem with the values and opinions expressed by different Decision Makers. The present paper develops the “Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II method” (GAHPSort II), which aims to sort a group of municipalities included in the UNESCO site “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero, and Monferrato” (Italy) according to the economic attractiveness of the landscape. Extending the previous versions AHPSort I, AHPSort II and GAHPSort, the GAHPSort II optimizes multi-stakeholder evaluations on large databases by reducing the number of comparisons. Moreover, the GAHPSort II method is proposed as a novel spatial decision support system because it combines a set of economic indicators for landscape and GIS methods for aiding the Decision Makers to better understand the case study and to support the definition and localization of policies and strategies of landscape planning and management.
... El caso más conspicuo es el de los Objetivos del Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS), cuyo objetivo 11 llama a "Lograr que las ciudades sean más inclusivas, seguras, resilientes y sostenibles". Con la dosis de ambigüedad que caracteriza al discurso político, también se hace uso frecuente como sustantivo (resiliencia) o adjetivo (resiliente) deseable en el uso de funcionarios y políticos (Baggio, Brown, y Hellebrandt 2015;Wagenaar y Wilkinson 2015). ...
Artículo sometido a dictaminación como parte del proyecto de libro "Un Mejor Estado: Lecciones de la Pandemia para Administrar lo Público", coordinado por Oliver Meza
Resumen
La administración del espacio público requiere de una administración pública capaz de mantener o incluso mejorar sus funciones esenciales durante perturbaciones relacionadas con el cambio climático, desastres naturales o pandemias, entre otros eventos que se enfrentarán de manera recurrente en las ciudades de México. La respuesta requiere de capacidad de adaptación ante una perturbación mediante políticas públicas flexibles, innovadoras y basadas en procesos de aprendizaje, entre otras características que incluye el concepto de gobernanza adaptativa para la resiliencia urbana. La administración de los parques y bosques urbanos requiere transformarse para contribuir a enfrentar los retos urbanos por venir. En este artículo se discute que la crisis por COVID-19 reveló que (1) la gestión del espacio público verde en México está basada predominantemente en un paradigma de recreación y mantenimiento, (2) la administración y planeación no tienen una visión de sistema de parques, y (3) tiene escasa vinculación con las demandas existentes de la ciudadanía, la cual tiene poco involucramiento en la toma de decisiones. Por lo anterior, la administración actual, en todos los niveles de gobierno, requiere cambios sustanciales para adaptarse e instrumentar las innovaciones que requiere la aspiración de construir ciudades capaces de administrar una crisis y mantener sus funciones. Para construir tales capacidades, se discute el paradigma de gobernanza ambiental adaptativa como condición para la construcción de ciudades resilientes, aplicado a la administración de parques urbanos en México.
... At the theoretical level, this recommendation requires breaching the functionalist orthodoxy inherent within resilience by re-conceptualizing the concept using theoretical perspectives that remain explicit about social inequality and conflict, power and agency. Steps in this direction are evident in Wagenaar & Wilkinson (2013) performative account for governing urban resilience as well as in the broader trend in scholarship acknowledging aspects of materiality, narratives and cross-disciplinary transactional processes conceptualizing socio-ecological resilience Stokols et al., 2013). On the practical level, reformulating planning discourses requires that planners and local policymakers pay increased attention and offer greater institutional and financial support to grassroots efforts without placing unrealistic institutional demands on citizen-led actions. ...
The first known use of the term “resilience” was in the study of natural properties of physical objects (Klein et al. 2004; McAslan 2010). Tredgold (1818) used it to refer to timber’s “stiffness, strength and its power to resist a body in motion”(p. 216). In its subsequent use in physics of materials and engineering, resilience conveyed the notion of resistance, rigidity, and represented the property of materials to revert to their original form or structure after being deformed by external forces. An object that reverted or “bounced back”, following the impact of an external force, without collapsing or breaking, was more resilient than one that either collapsed or took longer to bounce back. This understanding of “engineering resilience” held sway for more than a century and even influenced how natural ecosystems were conceived–in terms of stable states with natural and human activity acting as external forces or perturbations. It was against this orthodoxy that the resilience of natural systems was redefined by ecologist CS Holling, thereby sharply departing from its initial equilibrist focus (Holling 1973).
İklim değişimi, kaza ve afetler, artan nüfus baskısı, farklı sektörel talepler, yapılaşma vb. sebeplerle meydana gelen etkiler sonunda kentler bozulma ve hatta yok olmaya varan süreçler yaşamaktadır. Son zamanlarda bilim insanlarının yaptığı çalışmalar iklim değişimine bağlı olarak kentsel alanlarda sıcaklık artışı, su kaynaklarının azalması, kırsal peyzajların ve kentsel peyzajlar arasında koridor görevi gören yeşil koridorların kaybı, kentsel alanlara yakın havzalarda kirlenme, yaban hayatının ve biyoçeşitliliğin azalması gibi etkileri olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. Bu soruların azaltılması için kentlerin doğal unsurlarının gözetildiği ve sürdürülebilirliğinin sağlandığı koruma kullanma dengesinin gözetildiği yönetim anlayışına sahip olması gerekmektedir. Bu çalışmada kentsel sorunların doğa temelli çözümünün kentsel sürdürülebilirlik ve kent dirençliliğine katkısının değerlendirilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Kentsel dirençlilik dışarıdan maruz kalının bir etki sonucunda kentin tolere etme kapasitesine bağlı olarak tekrar dengeye gelme kapasitesi olarak tanımlanmıştır. Kentlerde gri çözümlerin yerini doğal unsurları destekleyen yeşil ve mavi çözümlerin getirilmesi ile ekosistemin desteklendiği, kent dokusunda koruma kullanma dengesini gözeten geleceğin kentlerinin kurulması konusunda önemli bir değerlendirme yapılması gerekliliği ortaya koyulmuştur.
Cities are emerging as the frontiers of low-carbon transition. The emergence of low-carbon cities in East Asian developmental states is often seen as serving nation-state-led transformative development and economic restructuring. But how are specific low-carbon infrastructures socially produced at the city level, especially in the context of social protests? What is the role of the local state? This paper addresses these questions through the case of Guangzhou’s waste-to-energy incineration, an infrastructure that was selected as a national low-carbon technology in China in 2014. The paper proposes a conceptual framework of “performative legitimation of infrastructure” and, drawing from the empirical work, identifies five performative governance tools – (re)conceptualization, reterritorialization, bureaucratization, culturalization and codification – which respond to evolving social demands, consolidate the legitimacy of incineration and regulate state–society relations in different contexts. The production of urban low-carbon infrastructure is presented as a material-discursive process that supports the legitimation of the local state.
The increasing frequency of extreme weather events poses ever greater challenges to urban resilience and residents’ quality of life. Despite a growing trend advocating for an anthropocentric approach to urban resilience, there remains an inadequate understanding of the evolving hierarchical needs of residents during post-disaster periods, especially considering the interplay with infrastructure service restoration. This study aims to address the gap by elucidating how emergency governance and urban infrastructure repairs can effectively address critical residents’ needs, providing empirical insights for improved resource allocation in infrastructure rush-repair scenarios. First, we categorize residents’ needs into three layers (safety and health, social livelihood and civic engagement) using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling. Subsequently, we present an urban resilience assessment framework that traces the recovery of residents’ needs alongside dynamic infrastructural functionality restoration, benchmarking against pre-disaster levels. Additionally, hypernetwork analyses are adopted to identify critical and evolving patterns of residents’ post-disaster needs over time. The robustness of our proposed framework is validated through its application to a dataset comprising 220,567 records from residents’ appeals during three recurrent rainfall events in Beijing. Theoretically, this study models the dynamic interactions between residents’ needs and infrastructure response during urban post-disaster recovery. Practically, the pinpointed critical needs guide efficient infrastructure rush-repairs and proactive disaster prevention in infrastructure maintenance.
Big changes have taken place in the Tampere University educational environment in recent years: the degree programmes have been reorganised and graduation times have been shortened. Other significant changes include the fusion of two universities, decreased ministry funding, digital-isation, and internationalisation. All these changes have taken place simultaneously throughout the university and have also affected the basic operations of the university's School of Architecture. However, it is not only the academic environment that has changed, but also the work of professional planners. New tools are needed to train motivated and competent professionals so that they would be ready to face a complex world of global challenges. A conceptual framework based on complexity thinking could be used as a tool for evaluating academic architecture education. In this essay, the complexity framework is probed against real life teaching situations, and its benefits and limitations are discussed. The empirical material of the study consists of university level courses in urban planning and design included in an architecture degree, with a focus on one specific course that the writers have been teaching. Based on student feedback and self-assessment , the findings of the learning situations and teaching methods as well as the development of students' capabilities are discussed and the curriculum as a whole reflected upon. The study results in a complexity-based evaluation method for teaching together with suggestions for the future development of the curriculum.
Urban ecosystems play a crucial role in providing a wide range of services to their inhabitants, and their functioning is deeply intertwined with the effects of climate change. The present review explores the dynamic interplay between urban ecosystem services and climate change, highlighting the reciprocal relationships, impacts, and adaptation strategies associated with these phenomena. The urban environment, with its built infrastructure, green spaces, and diverse human activities, offers various ecosystem services that enhance the well-being and resilience of urban dwellers. Urban ecosystems offer regulatory services like temperature control, air quality upkeep, and stormwater management, plus provisioning like food and water.They also provide cultural benefits, promoting recreation and community unity. However, climate change poses significant challenges to urban ecosystem services. Rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and increased frequency of extreme weather events can disrupt the functioning of urban ecosystems, impacting the provision of services. Heatwaves and urban heat island effects can compromise human health and energy demands, while changes in rainfall patterns can strain stormwater management systems and lead to flooding. Moreover, climate change can disrupt biodiversity and ecological processes, affecting the overall resilience and sustainability of urban ecosystems. To address these challenges, cities are adopting various adaptation strategies that recognize the interdependence between urban ecosystems and climate change. Green infrastructure interventions, such as the creation of urban parks, green roofs, and community gardens, aim to mitigate the impacts of climate change by enhancing the regulation of temperature, improving air quality, and reducing stormwater runoff. Additionally, urban planning and design approaches prioritize compact and walkable neighbourhoods, promoting public transportation and reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Furthermore, engaging communities in the management of urban ecosystems and climate change adaptation measures is crucial for ensuring equitable distribution of ecosystem services and building social resilience. Therefore, the review article highlights a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic interrelationship between urban ecosystem services and climate change and their implications. By recognizing and integrating the contributions of urban ecosystems, cities can develop sustainable and resilient strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change, ensuring the well-being and habitability of urban environments for present and future generations.
Resilience is a booming concept. It has been used in a variety of disciplines and has now also been adopted by planners and urban scholars to analyze how cities cope with vulnerabilities and threats. Engineering resilience and ecological resilience are discussed as early approaches to resilience. Current views on urban resilience emphasize the nonlinear, complex, and unpredictable character of urban systems and pay attention to the normative and political aspects involved in dealing with urban resilience.
Risk perception, a judgment of how risk is perceived individually and communicated scientifically, helps clarify local knowledge, know-how, and experience. However, community disaster preparedness and DRR planning have often overlooked community risk perception. This study investigates how risk perception at the community level influences and facilitates local DRR initiatives. It explores southwest Bangladesh as a case study, an area highly vulnerable to climatic impacts such as tropical storms, floods, and rising sea-level. This study analyses media and local narratives, in-depth interviews, and field observations. We find that community risk perception (a) tends to be ignored in local adaptation planning and (b) is shaped by four influential factors relating to local residents: their varied interests; socio-economic opportunities; attachment to place and community; and risk-tolerance capacity. The study advances theory in revealing a dynamic relationship among perception of risk, adaptive behaviour, and tolerance of risk. Practically, it helps local authorities in southwest Bangladesh and similar locales enhance DRR practices by considering community experiences and perceptions of risk. Though oft challenged by the contemporary socio-political dynamics of the Global South, transferring knowledge of risk perception to inform decision-making is critical to strategic planning in the face of disasters.
Adaptive co-management (ACM) has been advanced as a climate change adaptation strategy because of its social learning and collaboration dynamics. But it remains unclear whether ACM facilitates climate change adaptation in practice. Because rivers have been important laboratories for ACM efforts and research, this study examines a 30-year-old flow program on the Upper Arkansas River in Colorado (USA) to learn (a) how it is being impacted by climate change and (b) how participants are responding. The program has been largely successful in achieving its ecological and recreational flow goals, but it is being challenged by two hydroclimatic changes: earlier spring runoff and reduced stream flows. The program’s ACM dynamics are enabling adaptations that include efforts to communicate more proactively (social learning) and to compromise over the use of constrained flows (collaboration). We discuss these adaptations and pose additional questions about the future of the voluntary flow management program.
Rural areas in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, are undergoing various transformations, some induced by natural processes and others by human interventions. One has to acknowledge the increase anthropogenic actions on the Earth since the 1950 that have partly triggered the challenges facing the planet. Infusion implies a deliberate mainstreaming with debates, practices and policies of an agenda. In this case, in education, health, social policy directions and related matters, resilience thinking needs to be the bottom line of discussion. That away positive results are expected. This thesis contributes to the debate on planning, development and management of rural settlements under the impact of environmental disasters largely induced by climate change. The thesis suggests measures towards the infusion of disaster resilience thinking and practice in rural settlement planning. Publications in the study are informed by various methodologies, including literature review, archival, fieldwork, interviewing and surveys. The thesis is structured into four major sections. The first section, Section A covers Preliminary Pages of the thesis that include Dedication, Preface, Executive Summary and Abstracts of Publications and Acknowledgements. The second section, Section B is Introduction, Literature and the Study Local Context and covers three chapters, Chapter 1, the Introduction, Chapter 2, Natural Disaster Resilience, Rural Settlement Planning and Housing: A Literature Review and Chapter 3, Understanding Zimbabwe: Disaster Resilience Thinking and Practice and Rural Settlement Planning, Development and Management. The third section, Section C (see also Appendix 1) contains the articles and publications. Under this section, three categories of publications are presented, A, B and C. A are those papers that speak to the situation analysis regarding the incident of climate change and environmental challenges as they reflect in the rural areas. B speaks to those papers that try to speak to measurement and indicators of climate resilience plus global and regional experiences in the same. The C category speaks to possible options and initiatives that can be done for rural disaster resilience practice enhancement. The last section is Section D entitled Study Synthesis, Conclusion and Options. Quite apparent in the foregoing discussion and thesis is the acknowledgement that disasters and risks with the paraphernalia of their impacts are growing to be part and parcel of life at a global scale. As such resilience thinking is the way to. The buffeting shall continue but systems have to be proofed and designed that the readiness is always in place. Preparing for disasters and risks begins by the general awareness, followed by a deliberate step in putting ‘cushions’ in place. A collaborative approach is required. In the thesis, the study has demonstrated that the players are many and includes individuals, organised (and unorganised communities, divided by aspects of gender, age, professionalism, spatial boundaries, etc, government (local and central) and non-state actors (community – based organisation and corporates). There have different capacities and contributions to the debate and practice of resilience, mitigation and adaption. These players should have a principal agenda of tapping on the diversity to bring solution to different scales of intervention – site, community, district or precinct, regional, national or even international. They have to live above besetting politics towards creating consensus for wise action. The study proposes an 8Ss Model for inculcating resilience thinking and practice in rural settlement planning and management as a strategy for managing disaster risk.
Urban resilience is an attractive concept among academies and governments with the increasing severity of climate change and relevant disasters in cities. Few studies have been conducted to compare the key elements of attentions for enhancing urban resilience among Asian cities, although resilience is context-dependent. This study aims to compare the key elements of attentions for enhancing urban resilience among Singapore, Hong Kong and Hangzhou. A comprehensive literature review and expert interview validation were used to solicit the preliminary elements of attentions for enhancing urban resilience. Planners and researchers in the field of urban planning were surveyed to assess the significance level of the preliminary elements in the three case cities, as professional knowledge is required in the survey. Statistics were used to identify the key elements of attentions in the three case cities. Results demonstrate that the three cities have various elements of attentions for enhancing urban resilience despite sharing many similarities, which also demonstrate the guidance limitation of the general urban resilience framework. It also provides a reference for other international comparisons.
This article identifies a set of practices through which multiple actors, from the European Commission to local governments, perform the concept of the metropolitan region. It specifically investigates the practices and actions which brought this concept into being in the Prague metropolitan region of Czechia. We uncover how the meanings associated with the concept of the metropolitan region evolved through material-discursive practices constitutive of regional institutionalization. The article unpacks five practices which lie behind the initial stages of regional institutionalization: advocacy, framing, customization, implementation and evaluation. It contributes to both the conceptualization and practical knowledge of metropolitan development, planning and institutionalization in three ways. First, in suggesting a set of institutionalization practices, it redirects attention towards what actors do. Second, it highlights the role of materiality mutually intertwined with discursive elements. Finally, it documents how the intersection of multiple governance levels provides key actors with the resources needed to engage in the reconceptualization and institutionalization of the metropolitan region.
Employing an institutionalist approach to governance, and engaging with recent scholarship on organisational resilience and scalar politics, this paper focuses upon institutional reactions to terrorism in London between 1990 and 2020 and explores the mechanisms through which responses to disruption occurred. Empirically, this applied paper tracks specific emergency processes, governance assemblages and policy mechanisms that have been enacted in London in response to terrorism. More specifically, it tracks changes in the institutional dynamics involved in the reorganisation of traditional governance apparatus, the mobilisation of adaptive capacity, and the generation of multi-stakeholder visions for futureproofing against terrorist attack. Such institutional changes are explored through three vignettes of responses to terrorist incidents: against financial targets in the 1990s; in relation the risk of attack after 9/11 and in preparation for securing the 2012 Olympics; and in response to recent attacks against crowded places since 2012. This paper illuminates how institutional responses to terrorism have evolved from a focus upon small specialist networks that dealt just with terrorism, to much larger multi-institutional, multi-scalar and multihazard responses to, and preparations for, complex emergencies that cut across numerous administrative jurisdictions. The paper concludes by posing wider questions about optimal institutional form(s) required for responding to future shocks.
The paper develops a performative account of the ways in which knowledge and space are co-produced as humans move, develop social networks, and extend their cognitive practices. Such an account enables alternative ways of conceiving what counts as knowledge and as modernity to be held in tension, thus allowing the emergent generative effects of the Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel's concept of 'transmodernity'. Working with differing knowledge traditions requires, as Walter Mignolo recommends, thinking " with, against and beyond the legacy of Western epistemology. " What is at issue is the capacity to move beyond the point of 'colonial difference' explored by Mignolo in which Western knowledge gets authorised as universal and the rest get classified as 'people without history'. Only then can we enable differing knowledge traditions to work together without subordinating them and absorbing their differences in the western panopticon. This is not an easy task since the Western knowledge tradition in the form of science is hegemonic, and all other traditions are rendered as incommensurable, but to commensurate them is by definition to subordinate them and rob them of their cultural specificity. Equally, simply seeing them as different interpretations or different world views is too weak in the struggle for authority. To flourish, to have autonomy in the face of hegemony, indigenous knowledge traditions have to have an effective voice and construct their own identities. What is offered in this paper is a performative framework which is strong enough to destabilise the hegemony of western epistemology and generative enough to allow for real difference and the growth of cultural diversity.
This article was first published in the Journal Ecology and Society at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/:
Vos, Jan-Peter; Bornemann, Basil: The politics of reflexive governance: challenges for designing adaptive management and transition management. - In: Ecology and Society : a Journal of Integrative Science for Resilience and Sustainability. - ISSN: 1708-3087 (online). - 16 (2011), 2, art. 9.
The empirical evidence in the papers in this special issue identifies pervasive and difficult cross-scale and cross-level interactions in managing the environment. The complexity of these interactions and the fact that both scholarship and management have only recently begun to address this complexity have provided the impetus for us to present one synthesis of scale and cross-scale dynamics. In doing so, we draw from multiple cases, multiple disciplines, and multiple perspectives. In this synthesis paper, and in the accompanying cases, we hypothesize that the dynamics of cross-scale and cross-level interactions are affected by the interplay between institutions at multiple levels and scales. We suggest that the advent of co-management structures and conscious boundary management that includes knowledge co-production, mediation, translation, and negotiation across scale-related boundaries may facilitate solutions to complex problems that decision makers have historically been unable to solve.
Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social–ecological systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. Adaptability is part of resilience. It represents the capacity to adjust responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for development along the current trajectory (stability domain). Transformability is the capacity to cross thresholds into new development trajectories. Transformational change at smaller scales enables resilience at larger scales. The capacity to transform at smaller scales draws on resilience from multiple scales, making use of crises as windows of opportunity for novelty and innovation, and recombining sources of experience and knowledge to navigate social–ecological transitions. Society must seriously consider ways to foster resilience of smaller more manageable SESs that contribute to Earth System resilience and to explore options for deliberate transformation of SESs that threaten Earth System resilience.
The topic of the article is practice theory. Using a detailed example from public administration, we first discus the shortcomings of the model of practice as applied knowledge that we have dubbed the Received View. The first half of the article is a chronology of successive adaptations of the Received View. These adaptations have gradually brought the Received View more in accordance with the practice-oriented critique in social theory and research of recent years. These adaptations fall short, however, of offering a theoretical account that explains the relationships among practice, knowledge, and context. These adaptations do not enable us to show, as we wish to do, how knowledge and context can be explained in terms of—and are evoked within—practice, and not the other way round—and that this transpires within real worlds each of which has its own unique constraints and affordances, histories and futures. In the second half of the article, we pick up on a relational conception of practice, knowledge, and context in which practice is distinct and primary. To develop this aspect of practice theory, we make use of some key concepts from modern Japanese philosophy. The nondualist posture of Japanese philosophy gives rise to a useful conceptualization of the dynamic and fluid relationships among practice, the characteristics of the situation at hand, and the epistemic elements of practice itself. In this final section, we introduce three concepts that help capture this dynamic, relational understanding of practice: “actionable understanding,” “ongoing business,” and “the eternally unfolding present.”
This article assesses the institutional prescriptions of adaptive (co-)management based on a literature review of the (water) governance literature. The adaptive (co-)management literature contains four institutional prescriptions: collaboration in a polycentric governance system, public participation, an experimental approach to resource management, and management at the bioregional scale. These prescriptions largely resonate with the theoretical and empirical insights embedded in the (water) governance literature. However, this literature also predicts various problems. In particular, attention is called to the complexities associated with participation and collaboration, the difficulty of experimenting in a real-world setting, and the politicized nature of discussion on governance at the bioregional scale. We conclude this article by outlining a common research agenda that invites the collaborative efforts of adaptive (co-)management and governance scholars.
New concepts of governance take account of ambivalence, uncertainty, and distributed power in societal change. They aim for reflexivity regarding the limits of prognostic knowledge and actual control of complex processes of change. Adaptive management and transition management are two examples that evolved from the analysis of social-ecological and sociotechnical systems, respectively. Both feature strategies of collective experimentation and learning. In this paper, we ask how these two designs of reflexive governance consider politics. Based on a framework of different dimensions and levels of politics, we show that they are mainly concerned with problem solving by a focal process, but conflict and asymmetric power relations, as well as the embedding of processes within broader political contexts, are neglected. We suggest two routes for integrating politics into the design of reflexive governance: (1) recognize the politics of learning for sustainable development and develop safeguards against domination and capture by powerful actors, and (2) systematically consider the embedding of governance designs in political contexts and their ongoing dynamics for political fit.
In introducing this special edition, we argue that a shift in emphasis from positionality and representation to performativity and ontology offers a new approach to thinking about nature categories. Rather than criticising dualisms, we focus on how nature categories are produced and reproduced. The article addresses contexts of settler societies and industrial modernity, where concepts of wilderness and nature are called into play. We show how the articles in this volume together give new perspectives on how nature concepts are used and how they are made into relations or promoted to underpin social movements. By thinking about the 'relational ontologies' of nature, we offer a way to integrate contemporary insights from anthropology, philosophy, queer studies and science studies.
In the face of global urbanisation and climate change, scientists are increasingly using cities to experiment with more resilient forms of urban infrastructure. Experimentation represents the practical dimension of adaptation; it is what happens in practice when policymakers, researchers, businesses and communities are charged with finding new paths. This paper traces one particular lineage of experimentation to resilience ecology, which rejects the possibility of external control over a system, casting planning and administrative functions, and even scientists themselves, as part of a Social-Ecological System. Using insights from political ecology, laboratory studies and urban studies, the paper explores how ecologists involved with the Long Term Ecological Research Programme in the USA are embedding adaptive experiments into urban governance. Discussion focuses on the role of place in adaptive science, considering the political implications of ecologising urban governance and rendering it experimental.
This paper identifies a practice turn in current strategy research, treating strategy as something people do. However, it argues that this turn is incomplete in that researchers currently concentrate either on strategy activity at the intra-organizational level or on the aggregate effects of this activity at the extra-organizational level. The paper proposes a framework for strategy research that integrates these two levels based on the three concepts of strategy praxis, strategy practices and strategy practitioners. The paper develops implications of this framework for research, particularly with regard to the impact of strategy practices on strategy praxis, the creation and transfer of strategy practices and the making of strategy practitioners. The paper concludes by outlining the distinctive emphases of the practice perspective within the strategy discipline.
This essay explores design as the imposition of human purpose onto nature. It argues that understanding design requires that
we be able to distinguish among three different kinds of systems: natural, artifactual and human. Each kind has its own distinct
requirements for stability and sustenance, yet each is also dependent upon the stability and sustenance of the other two.
Design entails crafting artifactual systems by imposing aims and values from human systems onto the raw materials of natural
ones. Effective and responsible design, moreover, is undermined when distinctions among systems are ignored or when one kind
is treated as another. Life as we now live it is increasingly dependent upon the stability of our artifactual systems; this,
in turn, is increasingly dependent upon our ability to make the value judgments by which alone we can determine that a design
is worth making and how best to realize it.
Resilience is the magnitude of disturbance that can be tolerated before a socioecological system (SES) moves to a different
region of state space controlled by a different set of processes. Resilience has multiple levels of meaning: as a metaphor
related to sustainability, as a property of dynamic models, and as a measurable quantity that can be assessed in field studies
of SES. The operational indicators of resilience have, however, received little attention in the literature. To assess a system's
resilience, one must specify which system configuration and which disturbances are of interest. This paper compares resilience
properties in two contrasting SES, lake districts and rangelands, with respect to the following three general features: (a)
The ability of an SES to stay in the domain of attraction is related to slowly changing variables, or slowly changing disturbance
regimes, which control the boundaries of the domain of attraction or the frequency of events that could push the system across
the boundaries. Examples are soil phosphorus content in lake districts woody vegetation cover in rangelands, and property
rights systems that affect land use in both lake districts and rangelands. (b) The ability of an SES to self-organize is related
to the extent to which reorganization is endogenous rather than forced by external drivers. Self-organization is enhanced
by coevolved ecosystem components and the presence of social networks that facilitate innovative problem solving. (c) The
adaptive capacity of an SES is related to the existence of mechanisms for the evolution of novelty or learning. Examples include
biodiversity at multiple scales and the existence of institutions that facilitate experimentation, discovery, and innovation.
"This article reviews the variety of definitions proposed for resilience within sustainability science and suggests a typology according to the specific degree of normativity. There is a tension between the original descriptive concept of resilience first defined in ecological science and a more recent, vague, and malleable notion of resilience used as an approach or boundary object by different scientific disciplines. Even though increased conceptual vagueness can be valuable to foster communication across disciplines and between science and practice, both conceptual clarity and practical relevance of the concept of resilience are critically in danger. The fundamental question is what conceptual structure we want resilience to have. This article argues that a clearly specified, descriptive concept of resilience is critical in providing a counterbalance to the use of resilience as a vague boundary object. A clear descriptive concept provides the basis for operationalization and application of resilience within ecological science."
Milic Capek has devoted his scholarship to the history and philosophy of modern physics. With impeccable care, he has mastered the epistemologi cal and scientific developments by working through the papers, treatises, correspondence of physicists since Kant, and likewise he has put his learning and critical skill into the related philosophical literature. Coming from his original scientific career with a philosophy doctorate from the Charles University in Prague, Capek has ranged beyond a narrowly defined philosophy of physics into general epistemology of the natural sciences and to the full historical evolution of these matters. He has ex pounded his views on these matters in a number of articles and, systema tically, in his book The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary PhYSiCS, published in 1961 and reprinted with two new appendices in 1969. His particular gift for many of his readers and students lies in the great period from the mid-nineteenth century through the foundations of the physics and philosophy of the twentieth, and within this spectacular time, Profes sor Capek has become a principal expositor and sympathetic critic of the philosophy of Henri Bergson. He joins a distinguished group of scholars -physicists and philosophers -who have been stimulated to some of their most profound and imaginative thought by Bergson's metaphysical and psychological work: Cassirer, Meyerson, de Broglie, Metz, Jankelevitch, Zawirski, and in recent years, Costa de Beauregard, Watanabe, Blanche, and others.
This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism, generalised symmetry and free association, the paper describes a scientigc and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four "moments" of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their degnition of the situation on others: Z) problematization-the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by degning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the "obligatory passage point" of the researchers' program of investigation; G) interessemen- A series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that program; 3) enrolment- A set of strategies in which the researchers sought to degne and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; 4) mobilization- A set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. In conclusion, it is noted that translation is a process, never a completed accomplishment, and it may (as in the empirical case considered) fail.
Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. Songs of Experience is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual historians. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis-qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful-Songs of Experience explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience-epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical-Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of "experience" in modern cultures.
Perhaps the most significant development in American philosophy in recent times has been the extraordinary renaissance of Pragmatism, marked most notably by the reformulations of the so-called "Neopragmatists" Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. With Pragmatism offering the allure of potentially resolving the impasse between epistemological realists and antirealists, analytic and continental philosophers, as well as thinkers across the disciplines, have been energized and engaged by this movement. In Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, David L. Hildebrand asks two important questions: first, how faithful are the Neopragmatists' reformulations of Classical Pragmatism (particularly Deweyan Pragmatism)? Second, and more significantly, can their Neopragmatisms work? In assessing Neopragmatism, Hildebrand advances a number of historical and critical points: Current debates between realists and antirealists (as well as objectivists and relativists) are similar to early 20th century debates between realists and idealists that Pragmatism addressed extensively. Despite their debts to Dewey, the Neopragmatists are reenacting realist and idealist stands in their debate over realism, thus giving life to something shown fruitless by earlier Pragmatists. What is absent from the Neopragmatist's position is precisely what makes Pragmatism enduring: namely, its metaphysical conception of experience and a practical starting point for philosophical inquiry that such experience dictates. Pragmatism cannot take the "linguistic turn" insofar as that turn mandates a theoretical starting point. While Pragmatism's view of truth is perspectival, it is nevertheless not a relativism. Pace Rorty, Pragmatism need not be hostile to metaphysics; indeed, it demonstrates how pragmatic instrumentalism and metaphysics are complementary. In examining these and other difficulties in Neopragmatism, Hildebrand is able to propose some distinct directions for Pragmatism. Beyond Realism and Antirealism will provoke specialists and non-specialists alike to rethink not only the definition of Pragmatism, but its very purpose.
On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy--a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all. With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism he calls "practical drift"--the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from written procedure--to complete his explanation. His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal accident in a highly reliable organization.
Originally published in 1983. One of the basic capacities of man as a political being is his faculty of judgement. Yet for all the books on concepts like freedom, equality and authority, surprisingly little attention has been given to this topic in the tradition of Western political thought. What is the nature of political judgement? What endows us, as human beings, with the ability to make reasonable judgements about human affairs and to judge the common world we share with others? By what means to we secure validity for our judgements? What are the underlying conditions of this human capacity, and what implications does it have the understanding of politics? These questions, central as they are to any reflection on politics have rarely been addressed in a systematic way. This book examines Kant's concept of taste and Aristotle's concept of prudence, as well as recent works of political philosophy by Arendt, Gadamer and Habermas, all crucially influenced by Kant and Aristotle.
Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Pragmatism, this book argues for a new "problem-solving democracy," where public agencies build consent for public policy by engaging the public in active problem-solving. More so than legislatures, public agencies serve as linchpins between popular sovereignty and on-the-ground governance. For pubic agencies to play a different role in democracy, we must re-imagine how they function as organizations and interact with the public. The Pragmatist philosophy associated with Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead provides a framework for re-imagining that role. Pragmatism advances an evolutionary, learning-oriented perspective that stresses problem-driven, reflexive, and deliberative public action. The book uses this evolutionary learning perspective to analyze how public agencies might overcome tensions between centralization and decentralization, engage in more strategic problem-solving, and facilitate collaborative governance among public stakeholders. In developing these arguments, the book builds on and extends the current revival of interest of the social sciences in Pragmatism, reinvigorating an overlooked tradition of Pragmatist institutionalism. By showing how Pragmatism's evolutionary learning perspective can tackle issues at the heart of our current democratic malaise and engage the broad intellectual concerns of the social sciences, the book provides a concrete demonstration of why Pragmatism can serve as a powerful public philosophy.
A refreshed and expanded understanding of experience can contribute to a relevant reassessment of the nature of practice and its relationship with knowledge and context. We characterise experience as essentially transactional, as entailing constitutive interaction with the elements
of the social, institutional and physical world. It is within this transactional experience – within the push and pull of the world – that practice addresses the constraints and affordances of what we know and the contexts within which we generate and deploy what we know. Practice
is animated by and within experience. Building on a concrete case of police work, we propose and explore three characteristics of the animation of practice by experience: 'actionable understanding', 'ongoing business' and 'the eternally unfolding present'.
Introduction: the modernist legacy in policy analysis From its inception in August Comte's positive social philosophy, policy analysis has been a vanguard of the modernist project, the pervasive cultural programme characteristic of the western world, to take rational, scientific control over the social and physical environment and shape it according to a preconceived ideal. One of the cornerstones of the modernist programme in public policy and social reform, specifically, is the opposition between theory and action. From Charles Merriam to Harold Lasswell's policy sciences, via the rational choice theorists to the progenitors of the public choice doctrine, the aim of policy analysis has been to bring the unstable, ideology-driven and conflict-ridden world of politics under the rule of rational, scientifically derived knowledge. To see this traditional approach to policy analysis – and the critique that we develop in this chapter – in the intellectual currents of our age, it is important to be aware that the theory/action dichotomy is not just a belief or a doctrine that one can adopt or abandon at will. Instead it is an element of a broad cultural institution; a self-evident, habitual and tenacious understanding of the way we ought to relate to the world around us, that informs our opinions, values and self-image. This stance, as a seemingly self-evident positioning of ourselves as human actors towards the world (and because of its many unexpected intellectual ramifications, there is no avoiding of some philosophical context here), is almost wholly and unrecognizedly couched in epistemological terms.
With its origins in systems ecology and emerging interest in the inter-disciplinary examination of the governance of linked social-ecological systems, social-ecological resilience offers a field of scholarship of particular relevance for planning at a time when global ecological challenges require urgent attention. This article explores what new conceptual ground social-ecological resilience offers planning theory. I argue that at a time when planning theorists are calling for more attention to matters of substance alongside matters of process, social-ecological resilience provides a timely contribution, particularly given the minimal attention in planning theory scholarship to environmental and ecological considerations as a driving concern.
Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes' interpretive political science hardly needs an introduction to policy scholars. Their approach, philosophically sophisticated and grounded in a realistic appraisal of the nature of governing in modern liberal democratic societies, is of considerable significance to anyone in political science, public administration or planning with an interest in interpretive methods. Focusing on the concepts of meaning holism, anti-representationalism, tradition, dilemma and decenteredness, I briefly describe the philosophical foundations and substantive theory of interpretive political science. The main part of the essay consists of a critique of interpretive political science. My argument is that the key concept of practice is underdeveloped. The point of a philosophy of practice is to integrate belief and action to the point where they form one organic activity system for the purpose of moving about effectively in the world. Bevir and Rhodes' insistence on keeping belief and action separate and, in addition, on privileging belief as the major driver of change and adaptation to changing circumstances, inserts a deep inconsistency into their work; an inconsistency that, to my mind, becomes manifest in the relative paucity of their own empirical work. I conclude the essay with a brief exposition of what a practice-based, posthumanist approach to policy research entails (centering on the concepts of agency, the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, temporal emergence and cultural extension) and of what its practical implications are for policy analysis.
This text offers an understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical and engineering practice, and the production of scientific knowledge. The author presents an approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the number of factors - social, technological, conceptual and natural - that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another - "mangled" together in ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a greater understanding of scientific work both past and present. He examines the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice - the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory and the interrelation of machines and social organization.
In this essay, I begin with the premise that everyday organizing is inextricably bound up with materiality and contend that this relationship is inadequately reflected in organizational studies that tend to ignore it, take it for granted, or treat it as a special case. The result is an understanding of organizing and its conditions and consequences that is necessarily limited. I then argue for an alternative approach, one that posits the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday life. I draw on some empirical examples to help ground and illustrate this approach in practice and conclude by suggesting that a reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality will help us more effectively recognize and understand the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages entailed in contemporary organizing.
Analytical table of contents Preface Introduction: rationality Part I. Representing: 1. What is scientific realism? 2. Building and causing 3. Positivism 4. Pragmatism 5. Incommensurability 6. Reference 7. Internal realism 8. A surrogate for truth Part II. Intervening: 9. Experiment 10. Observation 11. Microscopes 12. Speculation, calculation, models, approximations 13. The creation of phenomena 14. Measurement 15. Baconian topics 16. Experimentation and scientific realism Further reading Index.
THIS REVIEW EXPLORES BOTH ECOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE BEHAVIOR OF NATURAL SYSTEMS TO SEE IF DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF THEIR BEHAVIOR CAN YIELD DIFFERENT INSIGHTS THAT ARE USEFUL FOR BOTH THEORY AND PRACTICE. THE RESILIENCE AND STABILITY VIEWPOINTS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS CAN YIELD VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCES. THE STABILITY VIEW EMPHASIZES THE EQUILIBRIUM, THE MAINTENANCE OF A PREDICTABLE WORLD, AND THE HARVESTING OF NATURE'S EXCESS PRODUCTION WITH AS LITTLE FLUCTUATION AS POSSIBLE. THE RESILIENCE VIEW EMPHASIZES DOMAINS OF ATTRACTION AND THE NEED FOR PERSISTENCE. BUT EXTINCTION IS NOT PURELY A RANDOM EVENT: IT RESULTS FROM THE INTERACTION OF RANDOM EVENTS WITH THOSE DETERMINISTIC FORCES THAT DEFINE THE SHAPE, SIZE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DOMAIN OF ATTRACTION. THE VERY APPROACH, THEREFORE, THAT ASSURES A STABLE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED YIELD OF A RENEWABLE RESOURCE, MIGHT SO CHANGE THESE CONDITIONS THAT THE RESILIENCE IS LOST OR IS REDUCED SO THAT A CHANCE AND RARE EVENT THAT PREVIOUSLY COULD BE ABSORBED CAN TRIGGER A SUDDEN DRAMATIC CHANGE AND LOSS OF STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF THE SYSTEM. A MANAGEMENT APPROACH BASED ON RESILIENCE, ON THE OTHER HAND, WOULD EMPHASIZE THE NEED TO KEEP OPTIONS OPEN, THE NEED TO VIEW EVENTS IN A REGIONAL RATHER THAN A LOCAL CONTEXT, AND THE NEED TO EMPHASIZE HETEROGENEITY. THE RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK DOES NOT REQUIRE A PRECISE CAPACITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE BUT ONLY A QUALITATIVE CAPACITY TO DEVISE SYSTEMS THAT CAN ABSORB AND ACCOMMODATE FUTURE EVENTS IN WHATEVER UNEXPECTED FORM THEY MAY TAKE.
Urban designers, ecologists, and social scientists have called for closer links among their disciplines. We examine a promising new tool for promoting this linkage—the metaphor of "cities of resilience." To put this tool to best use, we indicate how metaphor fits with other conceptual tools in science. We then present the two opposing definitions of resilience from ecology, and give reasons why one is more appropriate for linking with design. Additional specific tools and insights that are emerging from, or being increasingly used in, ecology can further support the linkage with urban design. These include recognizing the role of spatial heterogeneity in both ecological and social functioning of urban areas, the integrating power of watersheds, social and ecological patch dynamics of cities, the utility of spatial mosaic models to capture function, the use of an integrated "human ecosystem" modeling framework, and the consequent perspective of metropolitan areas as integrated ecological-social systems. Three additional tools are related to the adaptability of people and human institutions. First is the recognition of a "learning loop" in metropolitan ecosystems in which people respond to and affect ecological change, the use of urban design as experiments whose ecological and social outcomes can be measured, and finally the potency of a dialog between professionals and citizens, communities, and institutions, to support both research and design. The metaphor of resilience, and its technical specifications, draw these diverse strands for linking ecology and planning together.
As the human population grows and natural resources decline, there is pressure to apply increasing levels of top-down, command-and-control management to natural resources. This is manifested in attempts to control ecosystems and in socioeconomic institutions that respond to erratic or surprising ecosystem behavior with more control. Command and control, however, usually results in unforeseen consequences for both natural ecosystems and human welfare in the form of collapsing resources, social and economic strife, and losses of biological diversity. We describe the “pathology of natural resource management,” defined as a loss of system resilience when the range of natural variation in the system is reduced encapsulates the unsustainable environmental, social, and economic outcomes of command-and-control resource management. If natural levels of variation in system behavior are reduced through command-and-control, then the system becomes less resilient to external perturbations, resulting in crises and surprises. We provide several examples of this pathology in management. An ultimate pathology emerges when resource management agencies, through initial success with command and control, lose sight of their original purposes, eliminate research and monitoring, and focus on efficiency of control. They then become isolated from the managed systems and inflexible in structure. Simultaneously, through overcapitalization, society becomes dependent upon command and control, demands it in greater intensity, and ignores the underlying ecological change or collapse that is developing. Solutions to this pathology cannot come from further command and control (regulations) but must come from innovative approaches involving incentives leading to more resilient ecosystems, more flexible agencies, more self-reliant industries, and a more knowledgeable citizenry. We discuss several aspects of ecosystem pattern and dynamics at large scales that provide insight into ecosystem resilience, and we propose a “Golden Rule” of natural resource management that we believe is necessary for sustainability: management should strive to retain critical types and ranges of natural variation in resource systems in order to maintain their resiliency.A medida que la población humana crece y los recursos naturales declinan, existen presiones para aplicar niveles crecientes de manejo de recursos naturales verticalistas y de comando-y-control. Esto se manifesta en los intentos de controlar los ecosistemas y en instituciones socioeconómicas que responden a los comportamientos erráticos o sorpresivos de los ecosistemas con más control. Sin embargo, el comando-y-control tiene usualmente resultados imprevistos tanto para los ecosistemas naturales como para el bienestar humano, tales resultados toman la forma de recursos que colapsan, conflictos sociales y económicos y pérdidas de la diversidad biológica. En el presente trabajo, describimos la “patología del manejo de los recursos naturales” (definida como una pérdida de la elasticidad del sistema cuando la magnitud de la variación natural en el sistema es reducida), que condensa los resultados ambientales-sociales-económicos insostenibles producidos por el manejo de recursos con una óptica de comando-y-control. Si los niveles de variación natural en el comportamiento de un sistema son reducidos a través de comando-y-control, entonces el sistema se hace menos elastico a las perturbaciones externas, lo cual resulta en crisis y sorpresas. Nosotros proveemos de varios ejemplos de esta patología en el manejo. Una patología extrema surge cuando las agencias de manejo de recursos, pierden de vista sus propósitos originales debido al éxito del uso de comando-y-control, eliminando la investigación y el monitoreo y concentrándose en la eficiencia y el control. De esta forma, estas agencias se aislan de los sistemas bajo manejo y se hacen mas inflexibles en su estructura. Simultaneamente y por medio de la sobrecapitalizacion, la sociedad se hace más dependiente del comando-y-control, demanda con mayores intensidades e ignora los cambios ecológicos subyacentes o el colapso que se esta desarrollando. Las soluciones a esta patología no pueden provenir de un mayor comando-y-control (reglamentos), sino que deben provenir de estrategias innovativas que involucren incentivos que lleven a ecosistemas mas elasticos, agencias más flexibles, industrias más autosuficientes y una ciudadania más instruída. Discutimos varios aspectos del patrón y dinámica de los ecosistemas a gran escala que proveen una comprensión de la elasticidad del ecosistema y proponemos una “regla de oro” sobre el manejo de los recursos naturales, la cual creemos es necesaria para la sostenibilidad: El manejo debe esforzarse para retener los tipos y magnitudes de variación natural críticos en los sistemas de recursos a los efectos de mantener su elasticidad.
The resilience perspective is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of social–ecological systems. This article presents the origin of the resilience perspective and provides an overview of its development to date. With roots in one branch of ecology and the discovery of multiple basins of attraction in ecosystems in the 1960–1970s, it inspired social and environmental scientists to challenge the dominant stable equilibrium view. The resilience approach emphasizes non-linear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales. The history was dominated by empirical observations of ecosystem dynamics interpreted in mathematical models, developing into the adaptive management approach for responding to ecosystem change. Serious attempts to integrate the social dimension is currently taking place in resilience work reflected in the large numbers of sciences involved in explorative studies and new discoveries of linked social–ecological systems. Recent advances include understanding of social processes like, social learning and social memory, mental models and knowledge–system integration, visioning and scenario building, leadership, agents and actor groups, social networks, institutional and organizational inertia and change, adaptive capacity, transformability and systems of adaptive governance that allow for management of essential ecosystem services.
Presents a conceptual framework that can help focus treatment of the contrasts between global and local behavior on the one hand and between continuous and discontinuous behavior on the other. Since that framework describes different perceptions of regulation and stability behavior, it provides the necessary background for a 2nd topic, which concerns the particular causative relations and processes within ecosystems, the influence of external variation on them and their dynamic behavior in time and space. A 3rd topic synthesizes present understanding of the structure and behavior of ecosystems in a way that has considerable generality and organizational power. A 4th connects that understanding to global phenomena on the one hand and local perception and action on the other. -from Author
John Law argues that methods don't just describe social realities but are also involved in creating them. The implications of this argument are highly significant. If this is the case, methods are always political, and it raises the question of what kinds of social realities we want to create. Most current methods look for clarity and precision. It is usually said that only poor research produces messy findings, and the idea that things in the world might be fluid, elusive, or multiple is unthinkable. Law's startling argument is that this is wrong and it is time for a new approach. Many realities, he says, are vague and ephemeral. If methods want to know and help to shape the world, then they need to reinvent themselves and their politics to deal with mess. That is the challenge. Nothing less will do.