Abstract
On April 17, 2007, a lone gunman killed thirty-two people and wounded twenty-five others on the campus of Virginia Tech. This event, and subsequent responses to it, inspired Bruce Goldstein to organize a “Symposium on Enhancing Resilience to Catastrophic Events through Communicative Planning” at Virginia Tech in 2008. As one of the twenty-five researchers invited to participate, I can report that it proved to be a very stimulating and enlightening event. This book, Collaborative Resilience, is based primarily on the papers presented at that symposium.
Goldstein states in his introduction that the book’s essays “seek to answer if resilience can be cultivated among communities that face a wide array of challenges,” and to “explore how various collaborative processes can foster intentional communities” that respond effectively to crises instead of engaging in divisive blame-framing (p. 1). He wanted to learn how planning and natural resource scholars can help communities develop what he calls “communicative resilience,” especially with regard to “the tough cases: when crises are complex, when communities lack cohesion and capacity, and when resilience may require system transformation instead of merely recovery” (p. 5). The contributors to this volume (some well known to planning scholars, others to specialists in natural resource management) collectively “show the ways in which people in crisis collaborate” and present “stories of communities that have survived and thrived through adaptive consensus-building and transformative social change” (pp. 1–2).
Goldstein divides the book into two parts. The first, “Understanding Collaboration,” offers five integrative/theoretical chapters that discuss various ways in which collaborative processes can contribute to resilience. These chapters include Connie Ozawa’s “Planning Resilient Communities: Insights from Experiences with Risky Technologies”; Moira Zellner, Charles Hoch, and Eric Welch’s “Leaping Forward: Building Resilience by Communicating Vulnerability”; Sanda Kaufman’s “Complex Systems, Anticipation, and Collaborative Planning for Resilience”; Jana Carp’s “The Study of Slow”; and John Randolph’s “Creating the Climate Change Resilient Community.” Considered as a whole, these five insightful chapters argue that resilient communities enable people to recognize interdependencies within complex systems, communicate vulnerability, build trust, acknowledge the limits of individual cognition (e.g., the tendency to favor one-factor explanations and solutions for problems), deliberate collaboratively, slow down the pace of interaction, and value contributions from diverse publics as well as experts.
The second part, “Collaborative Resilience Case Studies,” consists of eight case studies, the first four of which describe collaborative processes that display “adaptive resilience.” These collaborative processes “tend to be highly inclusive and are intended to maintain system continuity and integrity by reorganizing in response to changing conditions” (p. 9). The four case studies of adaptive resilience include Luis Bojorques-Tapia and Hallie Eakin’s “Conflict and Collaboration in Defining the ‘Desired State’: The Case of Cozumel, Mexico”; Edward Weber’s “Getting to Resilience in a Climate-Protected Community: Early Problem-Solving Choices, Ideas and Governance Philosophy”; Patrick McConney and Terrence Phillips’s “Collaborative Planning to Create a Network of Fisherfolk Organizations in the Caribbean”; and Franklin Dukes, Jill Williams, and Steven Kelban’s “Collective Transitions and Community Resilience in the Face of Enduring Trauma.”
The second set of case studies focuses on processes that display “transformative resilience.” These cases show how “disempowered actors . . . can mobilize to reinvent institutions, overcoming an entrenched status quo” (p. 11). They include Robert Arthur, Richard Friend, and Melissa Marschke’s “Making Adaptive Comanagement More than a Marriage of Convenience: Reconciling Theory and Practice in the Management of Fisheries in the Mekong Region”; Karen Till’s “Resilient Politics and a Place-Based Ethics of Care: Rethinking the City through the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa”; Ryan Bullock, Derek Armitage, and Bruce Mitchell’s “Shadow Networks, Social Learning, and Collaborating through Crisis: Building Resilient Forest-based Communities in Northern Ontario, Canada”; and Bruce Goldstein and William Butler’s “Collaborating for Transformative Resilience: Shared Identity in the U.S. Fire Learning Network.”
In his concluding chapter, Goldstein puts forth his summary case for “collaborative resilience.” As he states in the opening chapter, the book “shows how collaboration can create and build community by fostering trust and the capacity for mutual reinvention,” and how collaboration “can create new kinds of knowledge, identity, and institutions” (p. 13). But in this concluding chapter he argues that collaborative resilience differs from conventional stakeholder-based consensus-building processes in four ways: (1) from right now to temporal bridging, (2) from places to cross-scale, (3) from problem solving to capacity building, and (4) from stability to change. In his view, communicative resilience offers the potential for communicative planners (who rely on postpositivist interpretive methods) and resilience researchers (who seek to enhance prediction and control by achieving greater understanding of system dynamics) to engage and learn from one another, while also enabling communities to define and pursue resilience through collaborative dialogue.
This certainly is a timely and valuable collection of essays. Crises of diverse types and diverse severity seem to be occurring with increasing frequency and, if climate scientists are right, the trend seems likely to continue. When these crises occur, people on site are usually traumatized and at a loss about how to proceed. Consequently, thoughtful insights from well-informed scholars might help them constructively work through their momentary shock and confusion.
While reading this book, I had several specific events in the back of my mind, all of which are really tough cases: the flood that ravaged my part of Iowa in 2008, the massive Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring and summer of 2010, the tsunami and nuclear meltdown that struck Fukishima, Japan, early in 2011, and the complete inability of the U.S. government to formulate a reasonable response to the long-term threat of climate change. And I found myself recalling heated debates in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Iowa, about how to mitigate against future flooding. With those events and debates in mind, I found myself especially valuing this book’s efforts to distinguish between adaptive and transformational resilience and to articulate “communicative resilience” as a synthesis of communicative planning and resilience research. I also particularly valued Connie Ozawa’s comments about trust, Moira Zellner and coauthors’ comments about communicating vulnerability, and Karen Till’s constructive critique of “the resilient city” and the assumed positive contributions of systems-based resilience.
Admirable though it is, the collection provokes questions that will require further research and skillful practice on the ground. First, how can self-interested individuals and organizations be persuaded to see themselves as having a stake in the well-being of the community (or place) in which they are embedded, especially when they are emotionally attached to preconceived ideological beliefs? Second, how can planners and natural resource scholars influence processes driven by scientists or public works engineers who have little or no experience with collaborative processes and who treat public questions and comments as mere input to be analyzed by experts? And third, how can scholars and practitioners inspired by “communicative resilience” influence public discourse in response to particular crises? What should they do when stories of blame begin circulating in public discourse, whether it be on cable television, talk radio, new social media, or face to face? Asked differently, how can such practitioners and scholars best contribute to processes by which problems are defined and the causes of a crisis are framed?
Collaborative Resilience is an admirable piece of work that skillfully combines theoretical essays and insightful stories of practice. It should prove valuable to anyone who wants to help communities respond to crises in ways that will enhance their longer-term viability. And, most admirably, it leaves us with questions that can be answered well only through careful research and skillful practice.