Resilience as pathway diversity: linking systems, individual, and temporal perspectives on resilience

Abstract

Approaches to understanding resilience from psychology and sociology emphasize individuals' agency but obscure systemic factors. Approaches to understanding resilience stemming from ecology emphasize system dynamics such as feedbacks but obscure individuals. Approaches from both psychology and ecology examine the actions or attractors available in the present, but neglect how actions taken now can affect the configuration of the social-ecological system in the future. Here, we propose an extension to resilience theory, which we label "pathway diversity", that links existing individual, systems, and temporal theories of resilience into a common framework. In our theory of pathway diversity, resilience is greater if more actions are currently available and can be maintained or enhanced into the future. Using a stylized model of an agricultural social-ecological system, we show how pathway diversity could deliver a context-sensitive method of assessing resilience and guiding planning. Using a stylized state-and-transition model of a poverty trap, we show how pathway diversity is generally consistent with existing definitions of resilience and can illuminate long-standing questions about normative and descriptive resilience. Our results show that pathway diversity advances both theoretical understanding and practical tools for building resilience.

Rethinking resilience and development: A coevolutionary perspective

“…2 (top pathway), a tractor is introduced but eventually that pathway fades away, perhaps because tractors are not well suited to the steep slopes of the fields in this context and contribute to soil erosion. This leads to path dependence, where diverse opportunities have in the meanwhile been diminished, for example, loss of diverse local agroecological practices (Lade et al 2020). In the lower development pathway (Fig 2), a new crop is introduced and some houses are built as a consequences of new livelihood opportunities.…”

“…Over time, resilience has become an increasingly popular term in development practice and research. While initially these efforts tended to focus narrowly on resilience as an outcome (Maxwell et al 2011), more recent approaches have implemented resilience as capacities of an individual, a community or a system to persist, adapt or transform (Béné et al 2014;Bousquet et al 2016;Brown 2016;Folke et al 2016;Jeans et al 2016;Lade et al 2020). The notion of resilience as capacity has long been a focus in ecosystem management and natural resource governance (Olsson et al 2004), where resilience is defined as ''the capacity to adapt or transform in the face of change in social-ecological systems, particularly unexpected change, in ways that continue to support human well-being'' (Folke et al 2016).…”

Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience

“…Resilience is "two-faced" and is neither good nor bad [55,73]. A system can be ecologically resilient but not socially desirable, and vice versa [21,103,104]. Resilience thinking fits with the complex systems theory within neoliberalism (or postliberalism) [43,74,99,105], which evolves from critiques of libertarians, environmentalists and leftists to a homogenising philosophy of top-down natural resource management and a desire of holism since the Cold War [106,107].…”

“…After cutting off the daily and seasonal interactions between the local communities and the landscape, the resilience of the landscape may ultimately decline rather than increase as expected ( Figure 6). In addition, a greater diversity of available actions in SESs is believed by scholars to be higher resilience when a system has to deal with shocks and stresses [104]. Limiting available actions of residents in the landscape as shown above also reduce its resilience.…”

“…Here, we are not aiming to participate in this debate but instead emphasise the power issues underpinning normative resilience. In short, higher resilience, such as higher pathway diversity, is not necessarily desirable [104]. Thus, even if the institutions and organisations in a system "can" draw on past disturbance and perform better in further disasters, the individuals in the institutions and organisations are generally struggling to maximise their power and affluence [87].…”