What might a resilient world be like?

At the moment, we are very far away from the understanding needed to ensure a resilient world.  A resilience approach opposes the preoccupation with increased production/yeilds/returns.  A resilience approach is about weighing up options, keeping options open and creating new options when old ones close.  
This, in todays world, is more important than ever.

As the remorseless process of globalisation brings us together, joining our cultures, our markets, our biota, we are becoming increasingly connected and homogenized.  The difference that once separated and defined us are getting smaller, our diversity is indeed declining.  Technological advances and cutting out genuine waste can make an important contribution, but optimisation, is a large part of the problem.  There is no such thing as an optimal state in a dynamic system.  The systems in which we live are always shifting, always changing and in doing so they maintain their resilience (to the best they can) - their ability to withstand shocks.  When we aim to increase the efficiency of returns from some part of the system by trying to control it, we usually do so at the cost of the systems resilience.


A system with little resilience is vulnerable to being shifted over the threshold into a new regime of function and state.  This very rarely provides the goods and services we want.
A resilient framework is all about creating space.  Pathways that foster experimentation and innovation that maintain the kinds of diversity that build resilience and enhance the social networks operating in a region.  These pathways have the greatest chance for achieving long-term well-being.


So, what might a resilient world be like?  What would it value?

According to Dr Brian Walker for the CSIRO, 

"Diversity:
A resilient world would promote and sustain diversity in all forms

Social Capital:
A resilient world would promote trust, well developed social networks and leadership (adaptability)

Innovation:
A resilient world would place an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embrace change

Ecological Variability:
A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to reduce it)

Modularity:
A resilient world would consist of modular components - everything is not necessarily connected to everything else.  Over-connected systems are susceptible to shock - a resilient system opposes such a trend and would maintain or create a degree of modularity.

Tight Feedbacks:
A resilient world would possess tight feedbacks (not too tight).  This allows us to detect thresholds before we cross them.

Overlap in Governance:
A resilient world would have institutions that include redundancy in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights.

Ecosystem Service:
A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services in development proposal and assessments."


Resilience thinking is a working progress.  To be successful it needs to emerge through people working with their local systems.  The list above is by far complete, you may like to add your own ideas to it.



In this lecture, part of the 2008 Deakin lecture series, Brian Walker considers and discusses how resilience theory applies to hot debates about tradition versus innovation. 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/resilience-rules/3164690