Resilience

Definition

James Cascio:

"Resilience means the capacity of an entity--such as a person, an 
institution, or a system--to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, 
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards. 
Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient 
structure would bend, but would be hard to break." (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/resilience)

See also: Resilience Theory

Description

Alex Evans and David Steven:

"In formal terms, resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks. (Walker et al, 2004)

Perhaps the best practical definition we have come across is the one offered by the Harvard Business Review. It states that resilience results from being able to face up to reality, improvise in the face of unfamiliar challenges, and at the same time find a source of ‘meaning’ in the challenges that encourages long-term thinking while affirming a sustaining sense of purpose (Coutu, 2002).

Both definitions emphasise the need to change while maintaining a coherent identity. Systems that are brittle, that try to remain static at all costs, are precisely the ones that are most vulnerable to collapse. On the other hand, systems that are flexible, adaptable, that deal with crisis through renewal are the ones that will tend to survive. This is, in other words, a classic collective action problem. The central determinant of a system’s resilience is the ability to act collectively, coherently, and with the right balance between short and long-term interests.

In a high resilience system, risk – and response to that risk – is distributed throughout the system. Individuals and their groups see their interests as compatible with the collective. They have a common understanding of the challenges a society faces and take decisions accordingly, but this understanding is not a straitjacket. Different actors play to the strengths and will often compete fiercely. But there is a balance between initiative and co-ordination, and broad buy-in to overarching institutional frameworks.

In a low resilience system, on the other hand, risks are felt disproportionately by some groups and responses are inadequate, over-centralised, or both. Longer-term interests are heavily discounted, individuals pursue narrow self-interest; and conflict between groups intensifies. As a result, key institutions are increasingly seen as failing to ‘deliver’." (http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/Renewal_resilience_article.pdf)

Characteristics

James Cascio:

• "Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a 
system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single 
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes 
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), 
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized 
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively 
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected 
loss of components.

• The recognition that failure happens is the other intrinsic part of a 
resilience approach. Mistakes, malice, pure coincidence--there's no 
way to rule out all possible ways in which a given system can stumble. 
The goal, therefore, should be to make failures easy to spot through 
widespread adoption of transparency through a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" embrace of 
openness, and to give the system enough redundancy and slack that it's 
possible to absorb the failures that get through. If you know that you 
can't rule out failure, you need to be able to "fail gracefully," in 
the language of design.
"

(http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/resilience)

8 Principles

"1. Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure.

2. Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue.

3. Decentralization: Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically.

4. Collaboration: We're all in this together. Take advantage of collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.

5. Transparency: Don't hide your system - transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws.

6. Fail gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won't make things worse than they are already.

7. Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they're not working the way you expected; don't count on things remaining stable.

8. Foresight: You can't predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare" (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4851)

Conditions for a Resilient World

Brian Walker:

"We are a long way from understanding how to create a resilient world. Nevertheless, it is possible to offer some visions for what a resilient world might look like.

• A resilient world would promote biological, landscape, social and economic diversity. Diversity is a major source of future options and of a system's capacity to respond to change.

• A resilient world would embrace and work with natural ecological cycles. A forest that is never allowed to burn loses its fire-resistant species and becomes very vulnerable to fire.

• A resilient world consists of modular components. When over-connected, shocks are rapidly transmitted through the system - as a forest connected by logging roads can allow a wild fire to spread wider than it would otherwise.

• A resilient world possesses tight feedbacks. Feedbacks allow us to detect thresholds before we cross them. Globalization is leading to delayed feedbacks that were once tighter. For example, people of the developed world receive weak feedback signals about the consequences of their consumption.

• A resilient world promotes trust, well developed social networks and leadership. Individually, these attributes contribute to what is generally termed "social capital," but they need to act in concert to effect adaptability - the capacity to respond to change and disturbance.

• A resilient world places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules, and embracing change. When rigid connections and behaviors are broken, new opportunities open up and new resources are made available for growth.

• A resilient world has institutions that include "redundancy" in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights. Redundancy in institutions increases the diversity of responses and the flexibility of a system. Because access and property rights lie at the heart of many resource-use tragedies, overlapping rights and a mix of common and private property rights can enhance the resilience of linked social-ecological systems.

• A resilient world would consider all nature's un-priced services – such as carbon storage, water filtration and so on - in development proposals and assessments. These services are often the ones that change in a regime shift – and are often only recognized and appreciated when they are lost."

(http://www.peopleandplace.net/featured_voices/2008/11/24/resilience_thinking)

Key Concepts of Resilience Thinking

From the Resilience Primer at Shareable [1]:

"Definition: resilience is the ability of an interdependent social and ecological system to absorb disturbances and maintain the same structure and function.

Other context:

• A resilient system copes well with shock
• As a system's resilience declines, the size of the shock from which it can recover gets smaller
• Resilience shifts management focus from growth and efficiency to adaptability
• An overemphasis on growth and efficiency of a system leads to a dangerous rigidity and fragility
• A resilience focus is increasingly important as the magnitude of the shocks in the world get bigger and more unpredictable
• Learning, flexibility, and self-organization are important to the ability to recover and thrive
• The aim of resilience management is to keep a system in a regime so it continues to deliver the desired ecosystem services and is not easily pushed into an undesirable regime from which it can't recover

KEY CONCEPTS OF RESILIENCE THINKING

• Nonlinearity, alternate regimes and thresholds. SESs include nonlinear dynamics. A system can shift dramatically into an undesirable regime from a small change if a threshold is crossed. Attention to thresholds is critical.
• Adaptive cycles. SESs tend to move through four recurring phases: growth and conservation (resources committed, stable, slow change, predictable), release and reorganization (resources freed up, chaos, fast change, opportunity). This is the cycle of life.

• Panarchy - multiple scales and cross-scale effects. SESs function at multiple scales of space, time and social organization. You must understand the cross-scale interactions to manage effectively at a specific scale. One key to this is to realize that each scale can be in a different phase of the adaptive cycle.

• Transformability. If a SES is pushed into an undesirable regime and can't be returned to it's former state, one option is to transform it into a new system with new variables, new livelihoods, and different scales of organization.

• General vs. specified resilience. Specified resilience is resilience of a specific part of a system to a specific shock. Focus on resilience of one part the system can come at the expense of other parts of the system. Balance between the two forms of resilience is important."

(http://shareable.net/blog/resilience-primer)

The resilience conceptual framework of Nicholas Gotts

"Characteristics of the resilience conceptual framework include:

1. multiple metastable regimes.

Rather than a single equilibrium point, such systems generally have multiple metastable regimes. Within each regime, change may occur, but the set of dynamically important variables and interactions remains fixed.

2. the importance of episodic change.

Systems with multiple metastable regimes may switch rapidly between them as critical thresholds are passed. Furthermore, hysteresis is common.

3. Resilience.

Holling and Gunderson (2002:28) define ecosystem resilience as “ ... the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure by changing the variables and processes that control behavior.” Resilience in this sense is central to the resilience conceptual framework.

4. multiple distinctive scales with cross-scale interactions.

Holling et al. (2002c:72) argue that ecological and social-ecological systems form a multilevel hierarchical structure, but that the different levels are of distinct kinds, i.e., the structure is not scale-free.

The resilience conceptual framework underlies a broad body of work, including a considerable number of detailed studies of regional socialecological systems (see any issue of Ecology and Society, and most of the chapters in Gunderson and Holling 2002 and Berkes et al. 2003). This body of work has now reached a state in which systematic comparisons can be made, particularly with regard to thresholds and regime shifts (Walker and Meyers 2004, Groffman et al. 2006). A significant subset of recent work within the resilience conceptual framework explores or makes use of the adaptive cycle metaphor to varying degrees, and this paper focuses primarily on these, but also draws on the broader resilience literature." (http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00004781/01/ES-2007-2017.pdf)

Example

Smart Grid

"Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a 
system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single 
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes 
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), 
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized 
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively 
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected 
loss of components.

A good comparison of the two models can be seen in the contrast 
between the current electricity grid (centralized, with limited diversity) 
and the "smart grid" model being debated (decentralized and highly 
diverse). Today's power grid is brittle, and the combination of a few 
local failures can make large sections collapse; a smart grid has a 
wide variety of inputs, from wind farms to home solar to biofuel 
generators, and its network is designed to handle the churn of local 
power sources turning on and shutting off.
" (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/resilience)

History

By Kevin Carson: Historical Models of Resilient Community

"The prototypical resilient community, in the mother of all “Times of Troubles,” was the Roman villa as it emerged in the late Empire and early Dark Ages. In Republican times, villas had been estates on which the country homes of the Senatorial class were located, often self-sufficient in many particulars and resembling villages in their own right. During the stresses of the “long collapse” in the fifth century, and in the Dark Ages following the fall of the Western Empire, the villas became stockaded fortresses, often with villages of peasants attached.

Since the rise of industrial capitalism, recurring economic depression and unemployment, and economic uncertainty associated with labor strife, have been the catalysts behind the creation of local exchange systems and the direct organization of production for barter.

A good example is the Owenites' use of the social economy as a base for independence from wage labor. According to E. P. Thompson, "[n]ot only did the benefit societies on occasion extend their activities to the building of social clubs or alms-houses; there are also a number of instances of pre- Owenite trade unions when on strike, employing their own members and marketing the product."

G.D. H. Cole describes the same phenomenon:

As the Trade Unions grew after 1825, Owenism began to appeal to them, and especially to the skilled handicraftsmen.... Groups of workers belonging to a particular craft began to set up Co-operative Societies of a different type—societies of producers which offered their products for sale through the Co-operative Stores. Individual Craftsmen, who were Socialists, or who saw a way of escape from the exactions of the middlemen, also brought their products to the stores to sell."

...[This pattern of organization was characterized by] societies of producers, aiming at co-operative production of goods and looking to the Stores to provide them with a market. These naturally arose first in trades requiring comparatively little capital or plant. They appealed especially to craftsmen whose independence was being threatened by the rise of factory production or sub-contracting through capitalist middlemen.

The most significant feature of the years we are discussing was the rapid rise of this... type of Cooperative Society and the direct entry of the Trades Unions into Co-operative production. Most of these Societies were based directly upon or at least very closely connected with the Unions of their trades, ...which took up production as a part of their Union activity—especially for giving employment to their members who were out of work or involved in trade disputes....

The aims and overall vision of such organization were well expressed in the rules of the Ripponden Co-operative Society, formed in 1832 in a weaving village in the Pennines:

The plan of co-operation which we are recommending to the public is not a visionary one but is acted upon in various parts of the Kingdom; we all live by the produce of the land, and exchange labour for labour, which is the object aimed at by all Co-operative societies. We labourers do all the work and produce all the comforts of life;—why then should we not labour for ourselves and strive to improve our conditions.

Cooperative producers' need for an outlet led to Labour Exchanges, where workmen and cooperatives could directly exchange their product so as "to dispense altogether with either capitalist employers or capitalist merchants." Exchange was based on labor time. "Owen's Labour Notes for a time not only passed current among members of the movement, but were widely accepted by private shopkeepers in payment for goods."

The principle of labor-based exchange was employed on a large-scale. In 1830 the London Society opened an Exchange Bazaar for exchange of products between cooperative societies and individuals.19 The Co-operative Congress, held at Liverpool in 1832, included a long list of trades among its participants (the B's alone had eleven). The National Equitable Labour Exchange, organized in 1832-33 in Birmingham and London, was a venue for the direct exchange of products between craftsmen, using Labour Notes as a medium of exchange.

The Knights of Labor, in the 1880s, undertook a large-scale effort at organizing worker cooperatives. Their fate is an illustration of the central role of capital outlay requirements in determining the feasibility of self-employment and cooperative employment.

The first major wave of worker cooperatives in the U.S., according to John Curl, was under the auspices of the National Trades' Union in the 1830s. Like the Owenite trade union cooperatives in Britain, they were mostly undertaken in craft employments for which the basic tools of the trade were relatively inexpensive. From the beginning, worker cooperatives were a frequent resort of striking workers. In 1768 twenty striking journeyman tailors in New York, the first striking wage-workers in American history, set up their own cooperative shop. Journeyman carpenters striking for a ten-hour day in Philadelphia, in 1761, formed a cooperative (with the ten-hour day they sought) and undercut their former employers' price by 25%; they disbanded the cooperative when they went back to work. The same was done by shoemakers in Baltimore, 1794, and Philadelphia, 1806. This was a common pattern in early American labor history, and the organization of cooperatives moved from being purely a strike tactic to providing an alternative to wage labor. It was feasible because most forms of production were done by groups of artisan laborers using hand tools.

By the 1840s, the rise of factory production with expensive machinery had largely put an end to this possibility. As the prerequisites of production became increasingly unafforable, the majority of the population was relegated to wage labor with machinery owned by someone else.

Most attempts at worker-organized manufacturing, after the rise of the factory system, failed on account of the capital outlays required. For example, when manufacturers refused to sell farm machinery to the Grangers at wholesale prices, the Nebraska Grange undertook its own design and manufacturing of machinery. (How's that for a parallel to modern P2P ideas?) Its first attempt, a wheat head reaper, sold at half the price of comparable models and drove down prices on farm machinery in Nebraska. The National Grange planned a complete line of farm machinery, but most Grange manufacturing enterprises failed to raise the large sums of capital needed.

The Knights of Labor cooperatives were on shaky ground in the best of times. Many of them were founded during strikes, started with “little capital and obsolescent machinery,” and lacked the capital to invest in modern machinery. Subjected to economic warfare by organized capital, the network of cooperatives disintegrated during the post-Haymarket repression.

The worker cooperatives organized in the era of artisan labor paralleled, in many ways, the forms of work organization that are arising today. Networked organization, crowdsourced credit and the implosion of capital outlays required for physical production, taken together, are recreating the same conditions that made artisan cooperatives feasible in the days before the factory system. In the artisan manufactories that prevailed into the early 19th century, most of the physical capital required for production was owned by the work force; artisan laborers could walk out and essentially take the firm with them in all but name. Likewise, today, the collapse of capital outlay requirements for production in the cultural and information fields (software, desktop publishing, music, etc.) has created a situation in which human capital is the source of most book value for many firms; consequently, workers are able to walk out with their human capital and form “breakaway firms,” leaving their former employers as little more than hollow shells. And the rise of cheap garage manufacturing machinery (a Fab Lab with homebrew CNC tools costing maybe two months' wages for a semi-skilled worker) is, in its essence, a return to the days when low physical capital costs made worker cooperatives a viable alternative to wage labor. In the Great Depression, the same principles used by the Owenites and Knights of Labor were applied in the Homestead Unit project in the Dayton area, an experiment with household and community production in which Borsodi played a prominent organizing role. Despite some early success, it was eventually killed off by Harold Ickes, a technocratic liberal who wanted to run the homestead project along the same centralist lines as the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Homestead Units were built on cheap land in the countryside surrounding Dayton, with a combination of threeacre family homesteads and some division of labor on other community projects. The family homestead included garden, poultry and other livestock, and a small orchard and berry patch. The community provided woodlot and pasture, in addition.

A Unit Committee vice president in the project described the economic security resulting from subsistence production:

There are few cities where the independence of a certain sort of citizen has not been brought into relief by the general difficulties of the depression. In the environs of all cities there is the soil-loving suburbanite. In some cases these are small farmers, market gardeners and poultry raisers who try to make their entire living from their little acres. More often and more successful there is a combination of rural and city industry. Some member of the family, while the others grow their crops, will have a job in town. A little money, where wages are joined to the produce of the soil, will go a long way....

When the depression came most of these members of these suburban families who held jobs in town were cut in wages and hours. In many cases they entirely lost their jobs. What, then, did they do?.... The soil and the industries of their home provided them... work and a living, however scant. Except for the comparatively few dollars required for taxes and a few other items they were able, under their own sail, to ride out the storm. The sailing was rough, perhaps; but not to be compared with that in the wreck-strewn town....

Farming as an exclusive business, a full means of livelihood, has collapsed.... Laboring as an exclusive means of livelihood has also collapsed. The city laborer, wholly dependent on a job, is of all men most precariously placed. Who, then, is for the moment safe and secure? The nearest to it is this home and acresowning family in between, which combines the two.

An interesting experiment in restoring the "circuit of labor" through barter exchange was Depression-era organizations like the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization and Unemployed Exchange Association:

...The real economy was still there—paralyzed but still there. Farmers were still producing, more than they could sell. Fruit rotted on trees, vegetables in the fields. In January 1933, dairymen poured more than 12,000 gallons of milk into the Los Angeles City sewers every day. The factories were there too. Machinery was idle. Old trucks were in side lots, needing only a little repair. All that capacity on the one hand, legions of idle men and women on the other. It was the financial casino that had failed, not the workers and machines. On street corners and around bare kitchen tables, people started to put two and two together. More precisely, they thought about new ways of putting two and two together....

In the spring of 1932, in Compton, California, an unemployed World War I veteran walked out to the farms that still ringed Los Angeles. He offered his labor in return for a sack of vegetables, and that evening he returned with more than his family needed. The next day a neighbor went out with him to the fields. Within two months 500 families were members of the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization (UCRO).

That group became one of 45 units in an organization that served the needs of some 150,000 people. It operated a large warehouse, a distribution center, a gas and service station, a refrigeration facility, a sewing shop, a shoe shop, even medical services, all on cooperative principles. Members were expected to work two days a week, and benefits were allocated according to need....

The UCRO was just one organization in one city. Groups like it ultimately involved more than 1.3 million people, in more than 30 states. It happened spontaneously, without experts or blueprints. Most of the participants were blue collar workers whose formal schooling had stopped at high schools. Some groups evolved a kind of money to create more flexibility in exchange. An example was the Unemployed Exchange Association, or UXA, based in Oakland, California.... UXA began in a Hooverville... called "Pipe City," near the East Bay waterfront. Hundreds of homeless people were living there in sections of large sewer pipe that were never laid because the city ran out of money. Among them was Carl Rhodehamel, a musician and engineer.

Rhodehamel and others started going door to door in Oakland, offering to do home repairs in exchange for unwanted items. They repaired these and circulated them among themselves. Soon they established a commissary and sent scouts around the city and into the surrounding farms to see what they could scavenge or exchange labor for. Within six months they had 1,500 members, and a thriving sub-economy that included a foundry and machine shop, woodshop, garage, soap, factory, print shop, wood lot, ranches, and lumber mills. They rebuilt 18 trucks from scrap. At UXA's peak it distributed 40 tons of food a week.

It all worked on a time-credit system.... Members could use credits to buy food and other items at the commissary, medical and dental services, haircuts, and more. A council of some 45 coordinators met regularly to solve problems and discuss opportunities.

One coordinator might report that a saw needed a new motor. Another knew of a motor but the owner wanted a piano in return. A third member knew of a piano that was available. And on and on. It was an amalgam of enterprise and cooperation—the flexibility and hustle of the market, but without the encoded greed of the corporation or the stifling bureaucracy of the state.... The members called it a "reciprocal economy."....

Stewart Burgess, in a 1933 article, described a day's produce intake by the warehouse of Unit No. 1 in Compton. It included some fifteen different kinds of fruits and vegetables, from two tons of cabbage and seventy boxes of pears, all the way down to a single crate of beets—not to mention a sack of salt.

The production facilities and the waste materials it used as inputs foreshadow the ideas of Colin Ward, Kirkpatrick Sale and Karl Hess on community warehouses and workshops, discussed in the last chapter:

In this warehouse is an auto repair shop, a shoe-repair shop, a small printing shop for the necessary slips and forms, and the inevitable woodpile where cast-off railroad ties are sawed into firewood. Down the street, in another building, women are making over clothing that has been bartered in. In another they are canning vegetables and fruit—Boy Scouts of the Burbank Unit brought in empty jars by the wagon-load.

Such ventures, like the Knights of Labor cooperatives, were limited by the capital intensiveness of so many forms of production. The bulk of the labor performed within the barter networks was either in return for salvage goods in need of repair, for repairing such goods, or in return for unsold inventories of conventional businesses. When the supply of damaged machinery was exhausted by house-to-house canvassing, and local businesses disposed of their accumulated inventory, barter associations reached their limit. They could continue to function at a fairly low volume, directly undertaking for barter such low-capital forms of production as sewing, gardening on available land, etc., and trading labor for whatever percentage of output from otherwise idle capacity that conventional businesses were willing to barter for labor. But that level was quite low compared to the initial gains from absorbing excess inventory and salvageable machinery in the early days of the system. At most, once barter reached its sustainable limits, it was good as a partial mitigation of the need for wage labor.

But as production machinery becomes affordable to individuals independently of large employers, such direct production for barter will become increasingly feasible for larger and larger segments of the workforce.

The Great Depression was a renaissance of local barter currencies or “emergency currencies,” adopted around the world, which enabled thousands of communities to weather the economic calamity with “the medium of exchange necessary for their activities, to give each other work.”31 The revival of barter on the Internet coincides with a new economic downturn, as well. A Craigslist spokesman reported in March 2009 that bartering had doubled on the site over the previous year. Proposed swaps listed on the Washington area Craigslist site this week included accounting services in return for food, and a woman offering a week in her Hilton Head, S.C., vacation home for dental work for her husband.

Barter websites for exchanging goods and services without cash are proliferating around the world. With unemployment in the United States and Britain climbing, some people said bartering is the only way to make ends meet.

"I'm using barter Web sites just to see what we can do to survive," said Zedd Epstein, 25, who owned a business restoring historic houses in Iowa until May, when he was forced to close it as the economy soured. Epstein, in a telephone interview, said he has not been able to find work since, and he and his wife moved to California in search of jobs.

Epstein said he has had several bartering jobs he found on Craigslist. He drywalled a room in exchange for some tools, he poured a concrete shed floor in return for having a new starter motor installed in his car, and he helped someone set up their TV and stereo system in return for a hot meal. "Right now, this is what people are doing to get along," said Epstein, who is studying for an electrical engineering degree.

"If you need your faucet fixed and you know auto mechanics, there's definitely a plumber out there who's out of work and has something on his car that needs to be fixed," he said.

As the crisis progresses, and with it the gradually increasing underemployment and unemployment and the partial shift of value production from wage labor to the informal sector discussed in C4SS Paper No. 4, we can expect to see the growth of all sorts of income-pooling and cost-spreading mechanisms.

These include a restored emphasis on mutual aid organizations of the kind described by Pyotr Kropotkin and E. P. Thompson.

As Charles Johnson wrote:

It's likely also that networks of voluntary aid organizations would be strategically important to individual flourishing in a free society, in which there would be no expropriative welfare bureaucracy for people living with poverty or precarity to fall back on. Projects reviving the bottom-up, solidaritarian spirit of the independent unions and mutual aid societies that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the rise of the welfare bureaucracy, may be essential for a flourishing free society, and one of the primary means by which workers could take control of their own lives, without depending on either bosses or bureaucrats.

More fundamentally, they are likely to entail people coalescing into primary social units at the residential level (neighborhood cohousing projects, urban communes and squats, intentional communities, extended family compounds, etc.), as a way of pooling income and reducing costs. As the state's social safety nets come apart, such primary social units and extended federations between them are likely to become important mechanisms for pooling cost and risk and organizing care for the aged and sick.

Poul Anderson, in the fictional universe of his Maurai series, envisioned a post-apocalypse society in the Pacific Northwest coalescing around the old fraternal lodges, with the Northwestern Federation centered on lodges rather than geographical subdivisions as the component units represented in its legislature. The lodge emerged as the central social institution during the social disintegration following the nuclear war, much as the villa became the basic social unit of the new feudal society in the vacuum left by the fall of Rome. It was the principal and normal means for organizing benefits to the sick and unemployed, as well as the primary base for providing public services like police and fire protection." (http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/C4SS-Resilient-Communities-and-Local-Economies.pdf)

Discussion

Towards a politics of resilience

Alex Evans and David Steven:

"The politics of resilience, then, presents a challenging agenda – one that takes us far beyond how well we respond to localised natural disasters.

In a complex and unstable world, it helps join up our thinking about a series of disparate challenges and provides a clear rationale for collective action. As Robert Cooper has argued: ‘If states are to retain control, the first condition is that they should make peace with each other so that they can face the common threat of disorder together’ (Cooper, 2003).

Facing common threats will require much more than goodwill, however. At present, all arms of international relations are in crisis. Military forces are struggling to understand a world where war is usually ‘amongst the people’, to use Rupert Smith’s phrase (Smith, 2005). Development agencies are having to accept that poverty reduction cannot simply be accomplished by the transfer of resources. Many diplomatic services, meanwhile, badly need to renew their ‘theory of influence’ in a world where issues trump geography, and non-state actors are an increasingly powerful force. Fundamental reform cannot happen in one country alone.

Instead governments need to work together to develop approaches that are integrated and interoperable. The starting point is greater ‘shared awareness’ of the nature of the threats that accompany globalisation, and an honest admission of the limits to government power (Evans and Steven, 2008). This should then encourage governments to reach out in two directions – upwards towards the international system, and downwards towards the world’s citizens.

But this is not simply a neutral question of governance; it is also a fundamentally political agenda. The politics of resilience holds both good and bad news for all major streams of political thinking: conservative, liberal and social democratic.

For conservatives, resilience’s appeal to tradition and identity is a strong one. However, the conservative instinct to resist change of all kinds is a clear threat to a system’s ability to adapt. Two quotes from the conservative philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, capture this dichotomy well. On the one hand, he writes that: In place of a preconceived purpose … such a society will find its guide in a principle of continuity (which is a diffusion of power between past, present and future) and in a principle of consensus (which is a diffusion of power between the different legitimate interests of the present).

On the other:

Change is a threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction … Changes, then, have to be suffered, and a man of conservative temperament (that is, one strongly disposed to preserve his identity) cannot be indifferent to them. (Oakeshott, 1991)

Liberals, meanwhile, have long argued for the diffusion of power. As Hayek argued, centralised control is not possible over systems ‘which no brain has designed but which [have] grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals’ (Hayek, 1974). He, after all, was awarded a Nobel prize over thirty years ago for his ‘penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena’. Classical liberalism, however, has consistently been troubled by government attempts to create public goods. The result is an instinctive opposition to regulation, which leaves little room for attempts to manage unstable global systems.

Social democrats, finally, understand the importance of public goods and are prepared to act forcefully to protect the vulnerable. They are also willing to act boldly to manage global instability. However, they have the weakness of being instinctive meddlers, crowding out the initiative of other actors and risking over-centralisation in the face of distributed risks. This is a time when states will be under pressure to take on new, and onerous, responsibilities, such as taking responsibility for regulating carbon and other scarce resources. Unprecedented institutional innovation will be needed if these responsibilities are to be discharged without imposing unsustainable levels of cost. It is surely therefore time to put the ‘nanny state’ out of her misery, while we search for a more sustainable relationship between government and state.

In the end, resilience is about a politics that is ‘progressive’ in a pure sense. Rather than following the ideological imprint of a bygone age, we need to be prepared to take a broad view of the systems that we depend on – and re-order our priorities to ensure that every action we take helps strengthen and defend them. That takes courage, and a farsighted vision of the future. The question is not ‘what risks do we want to avoid?’ but ‘what do we want to be resilient for?’" (http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/Renewal_resilience_article.pdf)

Six principles of organizational resilience

Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz:

"More recently, Ceridian Corporation collected best thinking and strategies to publish an executive briefing on organizational resilience. They highlighted the paradox that successful, resilient organizations are those that are able to respond to two conflicting imperatives:

• managing for performance and growth, which requires consistency, efficiency, eliminating waste, and maximizing short-term results

• managing for adaptation, which requires foresight, innovation, experimentation, and improvisation, with an eye on long-term benefits

Most organizations pay great attention to the first imperative but little to the second. Start-ups often excel at improvisation and innovation but founder on the shoals of consistent performance and efficiency. About half of all new companies fail during their first five years.

Each mode requires a different skill set and organizational design. Moving nimbly between them is a tricky dynamic balancing act. Disruptions can come from anywhere – from within, from competitors, infrastructure or supply chain crises, or from human or natural disasters. The financial crisis has riveted current attention, but it’s just one of many disruptions organizations must cope with daily. Planning for disruption means shifting from “just-in-time” production and efficiency to “just-in-case” resilience.

We draw from these two studies, and others, to develop what we call the six habits of highly resilient organizations.

1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.

Monitoring internal and external indicators of change is a means of identifying disruptions in advance. Resilient organizations seek out potentially disturbing information and test it against current assumptions and mental models. They work to detect the unexpected so they can respond quickly enough to exploit opportunity or prevent irreversible damage. In short, they anticipate to be prepared.

“[T]he two questions that keep coming up in almost every speech, panel, and hallway conversation,” reports Arianna Huffington from this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, “are ‘what went wrong?’ and ‘how did we miss the signals?’ The consensus conclusions: 1) Too much faith in the free market. 2) Too much faith in economic models. 3) Too little transparency. 4) No moral compass.”

2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.

Attentive preparations build a team that imagines possibilities and displays inventiveness in solving problems. Managers know how and when to allow employees to manage themselves for focused productivity as well as adaptive innovation. Resilient organizations cross-train employees in multiple skills and functions. They know that when people are under pressure, they tend to revert to their most habitual ways of responding.

After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Morgan Stanley, the largest employer at the WTC, realized it was operating in a highly symbolic building and began emergency preparedness with detailed plans and drills. On September 11, 2001 it had three recovery sites at the ready where employees could congregate and continue business. They began evacuating about 2700 employees one minute after the first plane hit, and their offices across 22 floors were almost empty when the second plane hit. They lost only six people. According to their 2001 Annual Report, investments in redundant computing and communication technology made after the 1993 WTC bombing also played a significant role in this successful recovery.

3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.

Even while executing for lean and mean performance, resilient organizations build in cushions against disruptions. The most obvious approach is the development of redundant systems – backup capacity, larger inventories, higher staffing levels, financial reserves, and the like. But those are costly and not always efficient. Flexibility is a better approach.

Engaging suppliers and their networks in devising makeshift solutions to temporary disruptions is a flexibility strategy. So are policies that encourage flexibility in when and where work is done. Employees who are used to telework and virtual workspaces adapt more quickly and are more productive following a crisis. In addition, research shows that flexible work practices contribute to greater employee resilience, productivity, and commitment, and to lower levels of stress.

In 1997, a fire at an Aisin factory in Japan destroyed most of the precision machine tools used to manufacture the P-valve used in rear brakes to prevent skidding. Toyota got 99% of its P-valves from Aisin. As a just-in-time manufacturer, Toyota had only a couple of days’ valves in its plants. While the fire was still burning, Toyota and Aisin immediately collaborated to make emergency requests of their networks of suppliers. Aisin helped other suppliers improvise different production techniques, providing them with detailed plans and technical support. Two days after the fire, the first valves came off the production line, and a week later, Toyota’s production line was back to normal. Two months later, Aisin resumed production at pre-fire levels.

4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.

A robust and redundant communications infrastructure holds up in a crisis. Social networks among employees at resilient organizations are rich, varied, and visible. People who have trust relationships and personal support systems at work and with friends and family are much more able to cope with stress and change.

Good connections and communications also apply to external relationships with suppliers and customers. A key is to recognize what’s important to meet organizational goals and to listen to those with needed expertise and ideas wherever they are in the value web.

Resilient organizations use networked communications to distribute decision-making. As much as possible, they push decisions down to where they can be made most effectively and thus quickly. This in turn requires good access to information at all levels of the organization.

After Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992, the state reassessed its preparedness and greatly expanded its planning to include stakeholders from every level of government, as well as organizations in the private sector, non-profits, and faith-based groups. These organizations came together to cooperate and collaborate, addressing the complex problems that none of them could solve by themselves. This Florida “megacommunity” was prepared for Hurricane Katrina, unlike localities on the Gulf Coast. In fact, within hours of Katrina’s landfall, more than 3700 of Florida’s first responders were deployed to affected areas.

5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.

In times of great uncertainty and unpredictability, the success and failure of small-scale experiments can help map a path to the future. Resilient organizations engage in market research, product development, and ongoing operations and service improvements. They invest in small experiments and product trials that carry low costs of failure.

UPS tells its drivers to do whatever it takes to deliver packages on time. They encourage improvisation to solve all the small things that can go wrong every day. At the same time, they have clear rules and regulations, such as always putting their keys in the same place, closing truck doors the same way, making only right turns 90% of the time to save time and fuel, and so on. Those routines, combined with creative improvisation, allowed UPS to deliver packages the day after Hurricane Andrew struck, even to people temporarily living in their cars.

Resilient organizations foster a culture of continuous innovation and ingenuity to solve problems and adapt to challenges. A side benefit is that employees who believe they can influence events that affect their work and lives are more likely to be engaged, committed, and act in positive ways associated with resilience. Some organizations also have internal idea markets to surface new ideas and innovations. Others use “crowdsourcing” to engage people externally in solving a given problem. Eli Lilly's Innocentive Open Innovation Marketplace is perhaps the best example.

6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

When an organization’s sense of purpose is shared by its employees, suppliers and customers, those networks can provide flexibility to help it through a disruption. Engaged employees will seek out opportunities to try new approaches, find creative solutions, and achieve great results.

A University of Michigan study of major airlines in the aftermath of September 11 found that those whose market value rebounded shared two characteristics: (1) they maintained their commitments to employees, and (2) they had adequate financial reserves. Others went bankrupt or out of business. Instead of layoffs or canceling severance packages and employee benefits, the resilient ones did everything they could to preserve employee relationships and loyalty. Financial reserves and a strong sense of purpose and organizational values made that possible." (http://www.peopleandplace.net/perspectives/2009/2/2/six_habits_of_highly_resilient_organizations)

Congruence between resilience thinking and the partnership view

Madronna Holden:

"In their 10,000 years of sustainable living here, our land’s diverse cultures had this in common: they treated all natural life as their intimate kin, with standing comparable to that of humans. “All animals and inanimate objects possessed spirits,” as STOWW (Small Tribes of Western Washington) stated in their handout for their 1975 treaty rights workshop. Among the Sahaptin-speaking people on the mid-Columbia River, the term for “life” is waq’ádyšwit, the “animating principle or ‘soul’ possessed by people as well as animals, plants, and forces of nature.” Waq’ádyšwit indicates “intelligence, will, and consciousness,” and since it exists in all natural things, it is the moral basis of the reciprocal partnerships between humans and their land.(1)

Similar recognition of personhood in nature is found in the traditions of the inland valleys as expressed by contemporary Coos-Kalapuya elder Esther Stutzman: “The earth is alive. It has a heart.” The indigenous peoples of Northern California likewise also perceived natural landscapes as comprised of persons alive with spirit. In the early 1900s, linguist Jaime de Angulo wrote of his frustration in trying to get a word for animals that contrasted with that for humans in the Pit River language. But there was no such word in their language, since there was no such distinction in Pit River culture.

The radical equality between humans and other natural life in the partnership worldview goes hand in hand with the recognition that nature and humans are intertwined in the holistic manner of Walker’s “socio-ecological systems,” in which “changes in one domain of the system... inevitably impact the other.”

In this sense, both the partnership model and the resilience paradigm offer an alternative to the dualistic split of the worldview that sets humans apart from and above nature. Both concur with the modern science that tells us whatever we do to our natural environment, we do to ourselves.

In recognizing the dynamic reflexivity between ourselves and the natural world, indigenous Northwesterners developed an ethic of reciprocity, which entailed sharing the gifts of life with others, taking only as much as you could replace from natural systems, and treating natural life with respect in order to allow it to flourish – which in turn allowed humans to flourish. In such reciprocity, we find the intersection of ethics and practical outcomes in an interdependent world.

Further, since all natural species were peoples in the partnership view, it followed that humans should establish diplomatic relationships with them. This conceptualization is not so different from Frances Westley’s chronicle of a contemporary resource manager’s work with adaptive Resilience Alliance guidelines.(2) In the modern case, the diplomacy took place between competing human interest groups. In the partnership model, the manager’s personal interest in caring for fish stocks would have been further developed and elevated to comparable status with his attention to human interests.

Historically, the partnership view impelled local peoples to act with consideration for the future generations of salmon and humans together. It also allowed for observation of the effects of human actions on other species as a whole. Drawing on this perspective, for instance, Lucy Thompson observed in 1916 that non-Indian rules for protecting the salmon on the Klamath River were bound to fail, since they were based on the actions of individual fishermen – but their actions taken together created a gauntlet of barriers the salmon could not run.

Such intimate observation of the salmon resulted in their abundance under native management, so that the indigenous peoples on the Columbia River, for instance, harvested seven times the modern take without harming the sustainability of the runs.

The ways in which the partnership model encouraged humans to manage themselves for the benefit of both their landscapes and themselves were not limited to the salmon. In Tending the Wild, Kat Anderson details the way that this worldview led to the exquisite bounty of root crops, wildfowl, and game recorded in hundreds of explorer records in native California. In like fashion, early explorers in the Willamette Valley termed it the “gourmand’s paradise” for the results of the specific management practices of the Kalapuya – and they would come to the Willamette Valley to stock up on provisions whenever they ran low.

The intersection of ethics and practical results in the partnership model is eloquently expressed by modern Nisqually leader Billy Frank, Jr., who has worked tirelessly both for Indian fishing rights and the care of the salmon and its habitat: “I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy we are. Because we and they are the same thing.”(3)

As modern Westerners, we cannot authentically or ethically take over the specific spiritual beliefs of other cultures. Nor can we return to the past. Yet as the Resilience Alliance’s workbook for resource managers observes, it is important to tell the story of ourselves and our land in ways that free us from the constraints of the ruling paradigm. In this context, the partnership worldview has much to show us about fostering a resilient world.

Those who hold the partnership worldview would certainly concur with Walker’s inclusion of diversity in his resilience vision. A partnership worldview inherently promotes such diversity in its recognition that all natural life possesses spirit and personhood. In this sense, the partnership view envisions the most democratic of socio-ecological systems, embracing what Vandana Shiva terms “a democracy of all life.”

Indeed, the partnership worldview immunizes its holders against the “paradox of domination” that goes along with the Walker’s “paradox of optimization.” The more one tries to control a thing, the less one sees it for what it is. One-way communication with natural life (we plant, you yield) subverts the knowledge we need to foster a resilient world. As a remedy for the dangers of such limited information gathering, the partnership model sensitizes humans to the ways in which natural life “talks back” to us.

This paradigm has important scientific potential, as expressed in geneticist Barbara McClintock’s Nobel Prize-winning work she accomplished through “speaking with the corn,” getting to know each corn plant as an individual. It was not a popular method for any scientist, much less a woman beginning work in genetics several decades ago. For years McClintock struggled to continue her research without the support of her colleagues, finding ways to fund her own work. In doing so she expressed leadership and inventiveness of the kind that Walker outlines as necessary for enacting a resilience vision.

This is also the kind of leadership expressed by Siletz Takelma elder Agnes Pilgrim Baker in taking on her personal commitment as a “voice for the voiceless.” She does not say, “voice of the voiceless.” She is not subsuming or taking over the voice of the other. Instead she is expressing the central stance in the partnership worldview: speaking up for those we might otherwise leave out of our goals or visions, in the same way that Mary Heck called attention to the beaver.

Such leadership reminds us that in order to gear our behavior toward fostering a resilient natural world, we need to increase our listening skills – and thus expand our range of vision.

Key to the success of the partnership worldview is its attribution of agency to all in any socio-ecological system. Thus it helps us embrace a question as pressing in this era of increasing globalization as it was to cultures with 10,000 years of standing in the Pacific Northwest." (http://www.peopleandplace.net/perspectives/2008/12/17/partnership_and_resilience)

Source

1. Risks and resilience in the new global era. By Alex Evans and David Steven. Renewal Vol. 17, No.1

URL = http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/Renewal_resilience_article.pdf

More Information

1. See John Robb's proposition for Resilient Communities
2. Paper by Kevin Carson at http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/C4SS-Resilient-Communities-and-Local-Economies.pdf
3. Resilience links: http://shareable.net/blog/resilience-links-from-people-place

Bibliography:

1. Coutu, D. L. (2003) ‘How Resilience Works’ in Harvard Business Review on Building Personal

and Organizational Resilience, Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

1. Tainter, J. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
2. Walker, B. et al (2004) ‘Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological

Systems’ in Ecology and Society 9 (2) Art 5.

1. Walker, B. and Salt, D. (2006) Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a

Changing World, Washington, Island Press. [2]

Resilience Alliance

1. The Resilience Alliance (RA) is a research organization comprised of scientists and practitioners from many disciplines who collaborate to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems.
2. The RA weblog is Resilience Science, at http://rs.resalliance.org/
3. The RA journal is Ecology and Society, at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/index.php.

Video

1. Elinor Ostrom on Resilient Social-Ecological Systems