Panel III: "Appropriateness of Resiliency as a National Strategy" Simin Davoudi, Professor, Environmental Policy and Planning, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

1. Simin Davoudi
Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning
Global Urban Research Unit (GURU)
Newcastle University, UK
Unpacking Resilience

2. ‘Resilience’: a coping strategy ?
2

3. 3

4. • Is „resilience‟ a buzzword or a useful concept?
• Is it replacing „sustainability‟ in policy
discourses?
• Three meanings of resilience:
• Engineering
• Ecological
• Evolutionary
• Pitfalls of translating resilience from the
natural to the social world
4

5. Resilience: etymology & origin
• From Latin root
Resilire: to spring
back
• Used by physical
scientists to denote
resistance to
external shocks
5

6. The ‘founding father’ of resilience thinking
• Holling, C. S. (1973)
Resilience and
Stability of
Ecological Systems,
Annual review of
Ecology and
Systematics, 4:1-23
6
Crawford Stanley (Buzz) Holling
Emeritus Professor of Ecological Sciences
University of Florida

7. 1. Engineering Resilience
Persistence
• “…The ability of a system
to return to equilibrium
state after a temporary
disturbance”
(Holling, 1973:17)
• Fail-proof design:
– Robustness
– Resourcefulness
– Rapidity
– Redundancy
(Bruneau, et al, 2003)
7
Millennium Bridge
Arup, Foster and Caro, 2000/2

8. 2. Ecological Resilience
Adaptability
“… the magnitude of the
disturbance that can be
absorbed before the system
changes its structure and
functions...”.
(Holling, 2001:33)
• Not just how long, but
also how much
8
Liberty Lake, WA, with summer
algae blooms

9. Bouncing back and bouncing forth
• Engineering resilience:
– Single equilibrium to which a
resilient system bounces back
• Ecological resilience:
– Multiple equilibria to which a
resilient system bounces forth
• Systems flipping between one
stable state and the next.
(Gunderson, 2000)
9
(Scheffer et al, 2001)

10. Equilibrium-based resilience and the
clockwork Universe
• World as a predictable
mechanical device
• To be kept in order by
command and control
10
Wetherell's Clockwork Universe sculpture at
Canberra, Australia (2009)

11. ‘Bounce-back-ability’ is everywhere!
• Resilience as the “capacity to absorb shocks and
to bounce back into functioning shape ....”
(D. Omand, quoted in Demos, 2009:18 emphasis added)
• The reorganisation was to „take all practicable
steps to… respond and cope with major shocks
[so] we can bounce back quickly‟.
(J. K. MacAskill, quoted in Demos, 2009:18 emphasis added)
11

12. Returning to ‘normal’?
• The aftermath of 2005
Hurricane Katrina, New
Orleans
12

13. Favouring post-disaster emergency
planning
• Focuses on sudden, large and
turbulent events (disasters)
• At the expense of gradual,
small and cumulative changes.
• Focuses on short term damage
reduction
• Rather than long term adaptive
capacity building
13

14. 3. Evolutionary Resilience
Transformability
• Systems as complex, non-linear,
and self-organising, “permeated by
uncertainty and discontinuities”
(Berkes and Folke, 1998:12)
• The ability of complex socio-
ecological systems to change,
adapt, and transform in response to
stress. (Carpenter et al, 2005)
• Create untried beginnings
• Break away from undesirable
„normal‟ 14
A watershed system, Durban, SA

15. Adaptive Cycle
(Holling, 1986)
15
(Pendall, et al, 2010:76; adapted from Gunderson & Holling, 2002)

16. The ‘panarchy’ model of adaptive cycle
16(Gunderson, 2009:5 adapted from Gunderson & Holling, 2002)

17. Interaction at multiple scales, speeds
and timeframes
• Small changes can
amplify into a
„regime shift‟.
• Large interventions
may have little or no
effects.
17
The butter fly effect (Edward
Lorenz, dynamical systems, 1963)

18. Evolutionary Resilience
• Is emergent:
– not as a fixed asset, but as a continually
changing process
– not as a being, but as a becoming
• Is performed when systems are confronted
with disturbance and stress
18

19. The world breaks everyone and afterward
many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway, A farewell to Arms (1929)
19

20. Resilience Framework
20(Davoudi, et al, 2013, after Folke et al, 2010)

21. Human intentionality
• Adaptive cycles seem
overly deterministic
• In the social context,
adaptive cycles and their
outcomes are „tendencies
rather than inevitabilities‟.
(Holling and Gunderson, 2002)
• There is room for preparedness
21

22. The politics of resilience
1. Self-reliance
2. Outcome
3. Systems boundary
4. Power, politics and justice
22

23. 1. From self-organisation to self-reliance
• Expecting people to, “pull themselves up by
their bootstraps and reinvent themselves in
the face of external challenges”.
(Swanstrom, 2008:10)
23

24. A misguided translation from ecology to society
• “If the Government takes greater responsibility for
risks in the community, it may feel under pressure
to take increasingly more responsibility, thereby
eroding community resilience”. (RRAC, 2009:6)
24

25. 2. Outcome and purpose of resilience
• Resilience towards what?
• Defining what is desirable is a normative
judgement.
• Is social conformity a desirable / „natural‟
outcome of resilience?
25

26. 3. Systems boundary
• “Resilience of what to what?” (Walker, 2002:187)
• Where do we draw the boundary in the social
systems?
• Do resilient communities make up a resilient
nation?
• Does greater resilience of one nation / one city /
one individual lead to lesser resilience for
others? 26

27. 4. Power relations
• “Resilience of what to what, and who gets to
decide?” (Porter and Davoudi, 2012: 331)
– Who defines resilience?
– What is its desired outcome? Who decides?
– Resilience for whom? under what conditions? etc
• In ecological literature, resilience is power-blind
and apolitical, partly because….
– “There are in nature no rewards or punishments, just
consequences” (Westley et al, 2012:103) 27

28. Justice and fairness
• In society some people gain, others lose in the
process of resilience building.
• Raising questions about distributive and
procedural justice
28

29. Lost in translation?
• “Applying the framework of ecological
resilience to human institutions and
governance processes generates paths to
greater understanding, as well as dead ends”.
(Swanstrom, 2008: 6).
29

30. Evolutionary resilience
• A potential bridging concept between the natural
and the social sciences.
• Capable of stimulating interdisciplinary
dialogues
30

31. Treading carefully!
• In trying to understand societies through the
lens of ecology, we should not lose the
insights from critical social science.
• In the social world, resilience has as much
to do with shaping the challenges we face
as with responding to them.
31

32. Further details and full references
• Davoudi, S. (2012) Resilience: A bridging concept or a dead
end? Planning Theory and Practice, 13 (2) 299-307
• Davoudi, S., Brooks, E. and Mehmood, A. (2013) Evolutionary
resilience and strategies for climate adaptation, Planning
Practice and Research, 28(3):307-322
• Porter, L. & Davoudi, S. (2012) The politics of resilience for
planning: A cautionary note, Planning Theory and Practice,
13(2):329-333
• Davoudi, S. (2013) On resilience, DisP: the Planning Review,
192, 49.I:4-5
32