S&T - State-and-transition model

focal scale - the thing that you're interested in

x resilience thinking is now emerging as a valuable process for engaging with the complexity of the systems around us.

xi As the systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, the question that inevitably arises is, How much can they take and still deliver the things we want from them? That, in a nutshell, is the central question behind resilience thinking.

xii an honest engagement with the concept of resilience increases our understanding of the systems we are working with.

xii This book is not a second edition of Resilience Thinking. It is a companion and sequel.

p.1 Working with resilience requires you to constantly reflect on what you are doing and why you are doing it.

p.1 Our focus in most of this book is on the resilience of social-ecological systems (linked systems of humans and nature). Resilience is a dynamic property of such a system, and managing for it requires a dynamic and adaptive approach.

p.1 While resilience science is not new, attempts to apply it in real-world situations have only recently started taking shape.

p.2 Resilience thinking provides a useful framework for a deeper engagement on why... systems behave as they do.

p.3 If you can appreciate the following ten key points, you're in a good position to consider how you can move from thinking to practice.

1. The systems we are dealing with are self-organizing.
2. There are limits to a system's self-organizing capacity.
3. These systems have linked social, economic, and biophysical domains.
4. Self-organizing systems move through adaptive cycles.
5. Linked adaptive cycles function across multiple scales.
6. There are three related dimensions to resilience: specified resilience, general resilience, and transformability.
7. Working with resilience involves both adapting and transforming.
8. Maintaining or building resilience comes at a cost.
9. Resilience is not about knowing everything.
10. Resilience is not about not changing.

p.4 First and foremost, resilience thinking requires that you recognize and appreciate that systems we depend upon are complex adaptive systems. We use the term self-organizing systems because most people seem to grasp that more readily... All the things that most resource managers are interested in... are self-organizing systems. You can change bits of the system, but the system will then self-organize around this change. Other bits will change in response to your control. Sometimes you have a good idea about how the system will respond to your actions, sometimes it's difficult to predict, and sometimes the response comes as a complete surprise.

  Most of the time the system can handle the changes it experiences... But sometimes the system can't cope with the change and begins behaving in some other (often undesirable) way... This often happens because our traditional approach to managing resources... fails to acknowledge the limits to predictability inherent in a self-organizing system

p.5 The three requirements for a complex adaptive system are

• It has components that are independent and interacting
• There is some selection process at work on those components and on the results of their interactions
• Variation and novelty are constantly being added to the system (through components changing over time or new ones coming in)

p.5 Complex adaptive systems have emergent properties (i.e., their future states can't be predicted from the properties of their component parts)... no one is in charge of the whole system.

p.23 It is about enabling you to engage with complexity and focus on what's important. Resilience thinking is a problem-framing approach to your system that seeks to help you decide what's important for the sustainability of the things you value, that you should be focusing on.

p.23 Consider again the basic definition of resilience. It's the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks - to have the same identity.

[JLJ - I would say resilience is the capacity of a system to support continued use - the production of goods or services or latent capacities, such as the ability to attack or resist (as in coordinated military units or the sum of forces in complex game of strategy), and including out of necessity any necessary reorganization or even repair, in order for the owner (or a user) to continue making progress towards desired higher level goals - in the face of the driving forces, the competition, and the unknown. Such a capacity can be estimated by diagnostic tests, which must be intelligently performed and which must accurately model or foresee effects which are emergent from the interaction of the system components, resources and driving forces.]

 p.25 Key Points for Resilience Practice

• Resilience is a dynamic property of a system, and managing it requires a dynamic and adaptive approach. There are many ways of putting resilience science into practice.
• The basics of resilience thinking involve appreciating a system's thresholds, domains, and linked adaptice cycles.
• Resilience thinking is about undestanding requisite simplicity. What, essentially, do you need to know about your system to keep it sustainable?
• Specified resilience is how far the surrent state of a system is from a threshold. General resilience is the system's capacity to manage a disturbance and precvent the state of the system from reaching a threshold.

p.32 Though this is a conceptual representation of the rangeland system, it makes it easy to envisage what a "safe operating space" consists of.

p.33 just as it is possible to increase your safe operating space, it's equally possible for it to shrink.

p.41-42 The key questions are, What is it about the system that you want to be resilient? What do people value in, and want out of, the system? And what are the big issues that concern them?

p.42 Biodiversity is not a product from the system; rather, it's a component of the system. So, from a systems point of view, it's helpful to consider these outputs in a stocks-and-flows framework.

p.48 Now we begin to attempt to characterize the dynamic nature of the system by looking at what the system has to deal with in terms of disturbances. It is useful to do this for three categories: characteristic disturbances, large infrequent disturbances, and unknown shocks.

p.53 Key Points for Resilience Practice

• A good description brings together the insights of the key stakeholders in the system.
• Good resilience practice is not so much about producing a single "best" system description as it is about creating a process whereby the system description is constantly revisited, reiterated, and fed into adaptive management.
• Understanding what's important in your system in terms of valued goods and services and the stocks that underpin them, and the interactions among these bundles of system goods and services, is a good way to begin coming to grips with the "resilience of what."
• Drivers cause change in controlling variables; as a controlling variable approaches a threshold level, a shock to a fast variable (goods/services), or a directional change in a driver, can push a system across a threshold into an alternate stability regime.

 p.67 Having developed an agreed-upon description of the system, the next step is to assess its resilience... So the next step is arranging the components you've described into an order that gives you some insight into how your system is behaving and changing - its dynamics over time. And, given those dynamics, what are the things you need to be most careful about?

  The task of assessing resilience encompasses understanding both specified resilience and general resilience... a full assessment also entails understanding the system's capacity for transformational change (transformability) - what capacities a system needs in order to reinvent itself.

p.67-68 In the spirit of the adaptive approach that is basic to resilience thinking, we applaud the diversity of approaches. Whatever works best for you is the way to go... Specified resilience, general resilience, and transformability lie at the heart of resilience practice. Understand these concepts and everything else follows.

[JLJ - Great, so as far as game theory goes, in order to "play" a complex game of strategy (at any more than a basic level) we must be able to improvise diagnostic tests of these three kinds of resilinence - construct it on the fly - in order to be able to "play" the game.]

p.68 Specified resilience is the resilience of some part of the system to particular kinds of disturbance.

p.77 A "mental model" of operation is how someone believes a system works and changes.

p.79 S&T models force people to be explicit about how they see the system functioning... can you describe the current state of the system and the possible alternate states it could be in?

p.80 Where and how you start developing your own S&T model depends on the information available. To begin you might try asking, What are the possible states the system can be in?

p.81 Keep in mind that developing these models is always a work in progress. The model always needs updating and is largely an instructional aid for discussing and understanding the specified resilience of your system.

p.83 The process of building the model forces you to be very explicit about how things change and the effects that a change in one component will have on other components. It tests your understanding of the system and does not allow you to be vague and imprecise... the failure of the model to produce credible results will force you to consider what is missing and to consider nonlinear (threshold) effects that may be responsible.

p.90 general resilience - the capacity of a system that allows it to absorb disturbances of all kinds, including novel, unforeseen ones, so that all parts of the system keep functioning as they were.

p.91 General resilience therefore has three important functions:

• Being able to respond quickly and effectively, in the right places in the right way
• Having reserves and access to needed resources, thereby effectively increasing "safe" space for operating
• Keeping options open

p.92 Various studies around the world have identified diversity, modularity, the tightness of feedback loops, openness, and reserves as important for general resilience... The list, then, is merely a starting point to guide thinking.

p.94 Where in the system is there only one way of carrying out a vital function?

p.98 see if you can answer the following questions...

• What has conferred "coping capacity" to your system in times of trouble? What worked in the past? If there were past failures, could they be attributed to any of the features conferring general resilience?
• Is there anything that is worrisome now?
• In a time of trouble, how good are the cross-scale connections and connections within the focal scale? Are there missing connections...?...
• Are there any trends in any of the attributes in the list above?

p.100 The ability to keep away from a threshold in the first place, maintaining a large safe operating space, depends largely on the attributes that make up general resilience. They are much the same as those that have been described for adaptive capacity - the capacity to deal with a shock when it happens... so as to avoid crossing the threshold.

p.101 Transformability depends on three main attributes:

• Getting beyond the state of denial (acknowledging the need for transformational change)... the use of scenarios to explore possible futures has proved to be helpful in achieving this recognition.
• Creating options for transformational change...
• Having the capacity for transformative change 

p.105 Key Points for Resilience Practice

• Resilience is not a single number or a result. It's an emergent property that applies in different ways to the different scales, domains, and cycles (and their interplay) that make up your system. It's relative and contextual.
• Assessing resilience involves understanding specified resilience, general resilience, and transformability.
• You assess specified resilinece by identifying alternate states and associated thresholds. This might be approached by considering known thresholds, thresholds of potential concern, conceptual models, and analytical models.
• Diversity, modularity, the tightness of feedbacks, openness, reserves, and high levels of all types of capital (including social capital) are important system attributes conferring general resilience.
• The attributes of general resilience interact. It is not possible to determine one particular level or amount of any attribute that marks a critical level. The most appropriate approach is to try to identify trends and changes and examine them in terms of possible effects.
• Transformability depends on three main attributes: getting beyond the state of denial, creating options for transformational change, and having the capacity for transformational change.

p.110 As will be the case with any group wishing to adopt a resilience framework, applying a resilience approach to planning and management does not mean starting from scratch... Adopting a resilience approach, therefore, involves putting a resiliece lens over the existing strategic and operational plans to see how and where such a perspective suggests things need to be changed, and what new things need to be included.

p.116 A resilience assessment... If an assessment is to be done, it should be properly resourced and done in an iterative way.

p.117 A resilience approach to management involves the development of an adaptive management and an adaptive policy (governance) program in which the interventions are considered experiments that test the assumptions that gave rise to them.

p.128 The essence of adaptive management is treating management as an experiment, or to be more precise, treating it as a hypothesis coupled to a management experiment to test it.

p.128 Adaptive management requires, at the start, an explicit statement of the expected response of the system to some particular management or policy intervention. If, after the intervention, the system's response differs from this expected response, then your understanding of how the system works was wrong. You therefore need to adjust your model of the system accordingly... adaptive management involves the development of an evolving model of system structure and function as management and policy development proceed.

p.129 adaptive management needs to be an integral part of any policy development that embraces uncertainty and adopts resilience thinking.

p.130 State-and-transition (S&T) models (discussed in chapter 3) can be used as a basis for adaptive management provided they can be made more predictive. One way to do this is to implement them in a form that allows quantitative updating of knowledge.

p.131 "nonadaptive" governance of a dynamic system with changing thresholds is bound to fail... Governance is adaptive when it changes in anticipation of or in response to new circumstances, problems, or opportunities.

p.134 Ask yourself if your system is in a trap. If so, is transformation needed?

p.145 Resilience is about coping with both known disturbances and unknown and unexpected disturbances.

p.146 Resilient people and communities are more inclined to see problems as opportunities for growth.

p.149 Ecological resilience is more about the capacity of a system to recover following a disturbance than the speed of that recovery... after a major disaster, the longer a community stays in a disturbed state, the more difficult it becomes for that community to recover... Being in a disturbed state sets up secondary effects that erode the system's capacity to self-organize and respond.

p.150 it is still necessary to be able to respond to unexpected issues in unexpected places, which relates to the problem of trading off general resilience against specified resilience.

p.161 does a resilience perspective offer any valuable insights into economics?

[JLJ - The authors roll up their sleeves and tell the economists exactly what they are doing wrong, but this is okay since they are "noneconomists" (p.166). Maybe they can tell the politicians what they are doing wrong (after all, they are also "nonpoliticians"), and essentially "fix" politics. Maybe they will solve all the world's problems in their next book: Resilience: all problem everywhere, solved. Maybe they should just stick with resilience practice. IMHO, economics will always be slightly out-of-step, because if it ever did succeed to any degree, it would then need to take into account those millions of people who now do things differently due to their new insight, which will now have to be accounted for, etc., in a circle that does not end.]

p.162 Maler and colleagues (2007) have proposed treating the amount of resilience in a system as a "stock" that can be valued in terms of its contribution to well-being.

[JLJ - Yet too much of a good thing is not necessarily a good thing - a fire extinguisher is good, but is 100 of them in the same place "better?" Resilience can be treated as a "stock" if the effects can be seen in intelligently constructed scenarios (which rise to the level of diagnostic tests) where we conceptualize the system stretching to adapt to its environment and tapping into the specific "stores" of resilience, whatever these are, or however such resilience is constructed or deployed. In sum, we cannot count anything as a "stock" of resilience if we cannot intelligently conceptualize it being "grasped" or used in an effort to counter the forces that exist which (intentionally or unintentionally) conspire to do-in our system - emergent and difficult-to-foresee effects included.]

p.164 Healthy resilient systems are learning systems that allow adaptation and change as circumstances change.

p.172 From a resilience perspective, what are the important aspects of this system?

p.193 What would a resilient world look like?

p.198 A comment we hear quite often is along the lines of "not everything is about resilinece." ...We contend... that resilience is a first-order concern... As uncertainty increases and controllability decreases, the likelihood of surprises increases, and so a resilience approach, including adaptive governance and management, assumes greater importance.

p.199 So, while resilience thinking is not a panacea, the more we can effectively put it into practice, the better shape our systems... will be in to deal with the looming surprises that lie ahead.

p.213 Adaptability (adaptive capacity): The capacity of actors in a system (people) to manage resilience. This might be to avoid crossing into an undesirable system regime or to succeed in crossing into a desirable one.