p.3 What insights does resilience thinking bring to understanding and action
concerned with reducing... vulnerability ...? What are some of the frontier challenges, tensions and gaps as resilience thinking
engages with perspectives and debates from other angles and disciplines?
The STEPS conceptual framework... shares a number of features with resilience
thinking. These include a systems perspective and a recognition that all social-ecological systems are complex adaptive
systems; an interest in interactions across multiple scales, captured in resilience alliance work on panarchy; and
a basic concern with resilience – or ―the capacity of a social-ecological system to absorb disturbance and reorganise
while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.
p.3-4 the STEPS pathways approach distinguishes four possible kinds
of strategy to deal with change: control to address short term shocks (stability) or long-term stresses (durability), and
response to shocks (resilience) or to stresses (robustness)... Strategies for Sustainability may require opening
up to methods, practices and arrangements – involving flexibility, diversity and adaptive learning – geared not
just to resilience, but also robustness.
p.5 The resilience approach recognises the potential for regime shifts,
which can in turn create both vulnerabilities and opportunities... The resilience approach emphasises the potential for learning
and experimentation and hence allows for the inevitability of failure/loss in parts of a system... Resilience-based planning
looks for opportunities for experimentation and adaptive management, and is therefore important for critical transformations,
especially in the context of climate change.
p.6 In response, Christo Fabricius echoed the view that responsiveness,
or ability to respond, is not necessarily inherently desirable. The key question turns on the ability to respond appropriately
– in terms of timing, intensity and resources... In this context, he emphasised the importance of
communities building up of capital and power to reduce their vulnerability. Yet, he suggested, there could
be a trade-off involved between capital/stability, and resilience/adaptability.
p.9 This suggests that change can be understood in terms of nested
sets of adaptive cycles operating over different temporal and spatial scales.
p.10 Per also stressed that resilience thinking is useful for thinking
about long-term transformation as well as just "bouncing back" after disturbance; "resilience is also about transformation
and the usefulness of transformation".
p.11 resilience draws attention not just to calculable
risks but to capacities to deal with uncertainties that cannot be predicted in advance.
p.13 resilience risks losing its value unless it becomes grounded in a language
that policy makers can understand, and that reflects realities on the ground.
p.14 First, there is great value in a systems approach as a heuristic
for understanding interlocked social-ecological-technological processes, and in analysis across multiple scales. Yet we
need to move beyond both systems as portrayed in resilience thinking, and the focus on actors in work on vulnerability, to
analyse networks and relationships
