Emergence of human resilience in coastal ecosystems under environmental change

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Resilience has been studied in a number of disciplines, predominantly in psychosocial and ecological sciences. Although there are striking similarities in their approaches, the psychosocial tradition has centered on the family and its immediate surroundings, whereas the social-ecological approach has focused on macrosystems that stop at the family level. Recently, the need for bridging these gaps has been echoed by researchers from both these traditions, particularly for promoting resilience of individuals and their wider environment in the context of natural disasters and climate change. However, a new synthesis of social-ecological and behavioral theories integrating multiple dynamic systems that interact across levels is strikingly rare. We addressed some of these issues in the context of complex coastal ecosystems in the Sundarbans region in southwest Bangladesh soon after the Cyclone Aila, which hit the coast in May 2009. The devastation that followed tested the endurance and resilience of people and nature alike. We used an integrated method that combined Antonovsky's sense of coherence scale with narrative inquiry for assessing human resilience. The quantitative analysis was able to address gender, educational, and livelihood dimensions of individual resilience. Life history narratives were found particularly useful in bringing out the underlying contexts and processes that embody individual social-ecological interactions that influence the construct of human resilience. These exercises show that the emergence of human resilience must be understood as a holistic and dynamic process because the variables that contribute to its emergence interact in complex ways.

Analyzing community resilience as an emergent property of dynamic social-ecological systems

“…We interpret this result to mean that there is no universal mechanism for enabling community resilience (Matin and Taylor 2015). Context matters, and the dynamics of community resilience in any location is influenced by an appropriate combination of capacities (Biggs et al 2012).…”

“…We illustrate how different capacities fit together and how their dynamics operate, with our results showing resilience to be experiential and responsive. As a property of a complex social-ecological system that facilitates or constrains what people can do in response to change (Matin and Taylor 2015), resilience is dynamic, nuanced, socially contingent, and context specific. We also show resilience to be a property of a self-organizing and self-regulating system, and our results indicate emergence in how specific events bring communities together to build resilience.…”

“…To understand how to enhance community resilience, social-ecological systems literature suggests that resilience is to be understood as an emergent property of human-environment relationships (Walker and Salt 2012). This means that resilience is shaped by interactions between different components of a complex system that influence the mechanisms through which resilience occurs (Matin and Taylor 2015). However, there is a lack of empirical evidence illustrating resilience as an emergent property and how it relates to community resilience (Berkes and Ross 2013).…”

Bringing rights into resilience: revealing complexities of climate risks and social conflict

“…Tschakert (, p. 2) draws attention to the significance of ‘multiscalar interactions, scalar dimensions of practice, and traversing scales’ in understanding and addressing equity in resilience and development. The multiple dimensions of scale may present potentials for scalar conflict and unwanted cross‐scale effects, such as where geographic communities exist at single scales, but communities of practice transcend scale (Chapin et al, ; Matin and Taylor, ). A rights‐based analysis offers an inherently multi‐scalar approach, with the focal rights regimes directing attention not just to communities, but also up to the state and down towards the individual scale, with the principles exploring the relations that mediate interactions between them.…”

Understanding human resilience in the context of interconnected health and social systems: Whose understanding matters most?

“…This special feature aims to generate discussion and possible answers to such questions. Matin and Taylor's (2015) findings from the flood-prone Sundrabands of western Bangladesh provides an example of studies of human resilience to disasters that combine a generalized understanding of ecosystem and economic resilience with human psychosocial resilience. In the aftermath of cyclone Aila of 2009, the coastal communities were hard hit.…”