Lost in Translation? Resilience ideas in science, policy and practice

1. Lost in Translation?Resilience ideas in science, policy and practice Katrina Brown University of East Anglia

3. Key argument • Resilience is a term in common usage, it has specific meanings in different scientific fields - important common features • Resilience ideas are not easily translated from scientific to either social nor policy realm • Resilience slogans are being used to promote ‘business as usual’ and stability - its dynamic sense is lost in translation • Could resilience be used to support more radical responses to environmental change?

4. Resilience in different disciplines the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks The RA website glossary at www.resalliance.org/ the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances Rutter, 2004 a multi-dimensional construct …the capacity of individuals, families, communities, systems and institutions to respond, withstand and/or judiciously engage with catastrophic events and experiences; actively making meaning without fundamental loss of identity African Health Services editorial December 2008

5. A Resilience approach • Expect change, manage for change • Expect the unexpected – uncertainty and surprise • Different types of change; slow and fast variables; feedbacks • Interactions between multiple stressors • Thresholds – ecological and social • Distinguish between coping and adapting – and tranforming? • Crises as providing windows of opportunity - for beneficial and detrimental change • Cross scale issues – panarchy, polycentric institutions; individual, family and community

6. Interrogating Resilience Resilience as a normative goal • Resilience of what, for what? • Winners and losers • Multiple meanings of Resilience • Narratives and contestations Resilience and climate change adaptation • How is current adaptation affecting Resilience? • Temporal, spatial, social differences and trade-offs • Options for transformability

7. Current Policy

8. 10 policy statements on Resilience • UNDP Human Development Report 2007/8 • World Bank World Development Report 2009 • UN Commission on Climate Change and Development 2009 • World Bank Pilot Program on Climate Resilience • WRI: Roots of Resilience 2008 • DFID White Paper 2009 • IPPR: National Security Strategy • Community and Regional Resilience Initiative: ResilientUS • US Indian Ocean Tsumani Warning System Program • Christian Aid Building Disaster Resilient Communities Project

9. Analysing discourses • Basic entities whose existence is recognised or constructed- this ontology of the discourse e.g. ecosystems, humans, or Social Ecological System • Assumptions about natural relationships e.g. how humans and ecosystems are linked, what affects Resilience and how it is defined • Agents and their motives – who or what are the key actors in shaping Resilience • Key metaphors and other rhetorical devices + Policy prescriptions and normative assertions

10. Three discourses • Optimist - nurturing resilience, scaling up, markets and Payments for Ecosystem Services • Pessimist 1- Disaster Risk Reduction and externally derived risks; strengthening ability to withstand shocks • Pessimist 2 – social vulnerability and social differentiation; poverty alleviation

11. Lost in Translation… • Limited mention of Social Ecological System WRI • Thresholds (WRI), feedbacks - absent • Connections and networks (IPPR, ‘adaptive networks’ WRI) • Transformative change – WB PPCR • Adaptive management • Disaster Risk Reduction • Multiple conflicting discourses – WB, WRI

12. A focus on stability and passive adaptation • “increased resilience results in ecosystem stability, social cohesion and adaptability, economic enterprise’ (WRI, 2008: 6) • to accommodate environmental and social change • the ability to withstand the impact of shocks and crisis’

13. Business as usual? “In the climate debate, improving resilience against impacts is of course known as ‘adaptation’ – but too easily this suggests that it is somehow separate from development. It isn’t. Adaptation simply means development under the conditions of a changing climate.” Douglas Alexander, 6th February 2008 “Adaptation is fundamentally about sound, resilient development” “climate-proofing development” “climate smart cities” World Bank, Climate Resilient Development in Africa, 2009

14. Climate Resilient Development • Mainstreaming adaptation a core component of development • Knowledge and capacity development e.g.weather forecasting, disaster preparedness • Mitigation opportunities through access to carbon finance • Scaling up financing • Making growth resilient to climate change

15. Resilient development? Approaches which prioritise resilience and human security • Economy: minimise social and environmental costs / growth • Environment: dynamic multi-equilibria / stable equilibrium • Institutions: poly-centric governance / managerialism and technocratic approaches • Poverty and well-being: new measures / economic measures • Agriculture: risk minimisation / yield maximisation

16. The dark side of Resilience? • As part of a dominant modernist and technocratic development • A colonising scientific model of environmental management? • Resisting Resilience • Power, knowledge, justice and self-determination • Resilience and transformation

17. Lost in Translation?Resilience ideas in science, policy and practice Katrina Brown University of East Anglia