Towards a bridging concept for undesirable resilience in social-ecological systems

Abstract

Non-technical summary Resilience is a cross-disciplinary concept that is relevant for understanding the sustainability of the social and environmental conditions in which we live. Most research normatively focuses on building or strengthening resilience, despite growing recognition of the importance of breaking the resilience of, and thus transforming, unsustainable social-ecological systems. Undesirable resilience (cf. lock-ins, social-ecological traps), however, is not only less explored in the academic literature, but its understanding is also more fragmented across different disciplines. This disparity can inhibit collaboration among researchers exploring interdependent challenges in sustainability sciences. In this article, we propose that the term lock-in may contribute to a common understanding of undesirable resilience across scientific fields.

Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience

“…The concept of building systems' resilience inspires the cultivation of the systems' capacity to recover from disruption and live with changes and uncertainties, and in doing so, challenges traditional or dominant management schemes [21]. However, many scholars find that integrating ecosystem and society within such a unified lens-that is, building resilience for the whole SES-clashes with a range of cornerstone concepts in social science for politics and governance in human society, such as power, democracy, rights, and culture (Klein et al, 2004, Davoudi et al, 2012, Fabinyi et al, 2014, Meerow and Newell, 2019.…”

“…Building resilience in all parts of the SESs rather than to particular threats has been one of the main approaches proposed by resilience scholars (Olsson et al, 2014, Walker, 2020. However, this idealistic approach is very difficult to implement in practice, as building the resilience of some groups to certain threats will unavoidably detract from the interests of other groups [21,[72][73][74][75][76]. For instance, in managing rivers, different stakeholders compete for conflicting ecosystem services such as fish versus hydroelectricity [77,78].…”

“…Explicitly stating the motivations What is the goal of building resilience? [16,21] Is resilience a good characteristic all the time? What are the underlying motivations for building resilience?…”

“…To identify potential conflicts and instruct management, these two research questions need to be asked by researchers, managers and decision-makers before approaching the task of building landscape resilience. A landscape cannot provide the same values to all stakeholders and the prognosis of risks and challenges is also essential as identification or opportunities and benefits [21]. Considering the urgency and need to incorporate resilience into management normatively, we reviewed 111,653 publications on landscape management and summarised the research trends in this area.…”

The Rise of Resilience in Spatial Planning: A Journey through Disciplinary Boundaries and Contested Practices

“…The need for specification may prove even more useful to first unravel and then handle, the implicit normativity embedded in weighing the desirable and undesirable aspects of resilience. Hence, after reviewing resilience-with-adjectives phrases (perverse, unhelpful, wicked resilience) or synonyms (path dependency, institutional inertia, lock-in), that convey negative connotations, a case can be made for adopting further complementary concepts to bridge those critical approaches that have been so far affected by a disciplinary silo effect, and help make sense of the interrelations between resilience, sustainability and transitions [65].…”