Resilient Systems, Resilient Communities

Abstract

Against the background of anthropogenic change, rapidly rising global temperatures and extremes of crisis across multiple spheres, the real possibility of synchronous inter-systemic failure at a level involving multiple cascading system failures (Homer-Dixon et.al. 2015) demands urgent responses. From this perspective, the need for an integrated, whole-system approach to understanding and fostering radical social and ecological transformation has never been starker. The impact of rapid and irreversible biospheric changes calls for an urgent re-thinking of the role of resilience in understanding the ability of both human and non-human communities to adapt to a vastly different environment with enormous social and economic as well as biological implications. In this context, resilience thinking and resilience theory have become major tools for understanding social and ecological change across multiple disciplinary fields. This small contribution attempts to clarify the usefulness of resilience as a framework for understanding and supporting the adaptability of social and ecological systems by centering recent work by scholars in the Intersections of Sustainability transdisciplinary research network within current resilience thinking and theory.

Keywords: resilience thinking, resilient communities, climate change, reflexive law, adaptation, prairies, Alberta, watersheds, water law, indigenous communities