Abstract
With its origins in systems ecology and emerging interest in the inter-disciplinary examination of the governance of linked social-ecological systems, social-ecological resilience offers a field of scholarship of particular relevance for planning at a time when global ecological challenges require urgent attention. This article explores what new conceptual ground social-ecological resilience offers planning theory. I argue that at a time when planning theorists are calling for more attention to matters of substance alongside matters of process, social-ecological resilience provides a timely contribution, particularly given the minimal attention in planning theory scholarship to environmental and ecological considerations as a driving concern.
Keywords
Introduction
There is increasing interest in social-ecological resilience from planning and related disciplines. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to this emerging inter-disciplinary exploration. It engages the following questions – what, if any, new conceptual ground does social-ecological resilience offer planning theory, and more broadly what issues does social-ecological resilience raise for further scholarship by planning theorists?
I argue that at a time when planning theorists are calling for more attention to matters of substance alongside matters of process, social-ecological resilience provides a timely contribution with its specific attention to linked social-ecological systems. Further, the particular way in which linked social-ecological systems are conceptualized – as complex adaptive systems – responds to recent calls within planning theory for more attention to the implications of non-linear dynamics of ecosystems. Given the minimal attention in planning theory scholarship to environmental and ecological considerations as a driving concern, this is particularly relevant. I clarify that social-ecological resilience is most relevant for normative planning theory rather than critical planning theory, given that it is yet to develop a strong theoretical basis for addressing matters of power, conflict, contradiction and culture. Finally, I suggest that perhaps the most significant contribution of social-ecological resilience for planning is its role as a different and useful frame for both problem-setting and problem-solving.
Social-ecological resilience originates in systems ecology (Holling, 1973) and is based on assumptions of non-linear dynamics of change in complex, linked social-ecological systems (Folke, 2006). These understandings challenged the foundational underpinnings of traditional natural resource management (including assumptions such as equilibrium, stability and predictability) (Holling, 1978) and gave priority instead to more adaptive modes of governance and attention to cross-scale interactions (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Walker et al., 2009).
Social-ecological resilience, with its focus on the governance of linked social-ecological systems, is of interest to the field of planning for several reasons. First, there is increasing general recognition of the critical importance of ecological considerations for urban studies (Davoudi and Mehmood (eds) 2010; Evans, 2011; Murdoch, 2006). This is driven significantly by the disproportional detrimental impact cities have on the global environment (Grimm et al., 2008) and increased attention to biophysical planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009), including climate change (Davoudi et al., 2010; Wilson and Piper, 2010). In this respect I take up the challenge increasingly raised by planning theorists (see for example Campbell, 2006; Dear, 2000; Fincher and Iveson, 2008; Ness and Saglie, 2000) to give more attention to substantive matters (in this case ecological concerns) in planning theory, as distinct from the current emphasis in planning theory on matters of process. Second, and more particularly, the question has been asked in planning theory: what would it take to ‘think planning again’ (Swyngedouw, 2010: 313) in ways that acknowledge the contingency, unpredictability and inevitability of ecological processes? Social-ecological resilience has already been identified as having potential to assist planning with such questions (Wilkinson, 2010), albeit little theoretical work has progressed. Third, ‘resilience’ is ‘increasingly influential’ as an urban policy discourse and has now been taken up by a wide range of international urban initiatives as well as national and metropolitan policy agendas (Evans, 2011). Critical examination of the assumptions underpinning social-ecological resilience is therefore timely. Finally, there is strong prima facie case for inter-disciplinary learning between social-ecological resilience and planning. Both disciplines are fundamentally concerned with human–nature relations, directly related to practice domains (natural resource management and urban governance, respectively), concerned with cross-scale spatial dynamics in complex systems, and share a normative interest in sustainability (Wilkinson et al., 2010).
To date there has only been limited inter-disciplinary research across these two fields, albeit the general use of resilience as an analytical framework of sorts for urban related studies is quickly expanding and now includes the following: mitigation and adaptation to climate change (Wardekker et al., 2009); disaster planning, management and recovery (Campanella, 2006; Goldstein, 2008; Goldstein, 2009; Vale and Campanella, 2005); energy and environmental security (Coaffee, 2008); climate change (Deppisch and Hasibovic, 2011; Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete, 2011); urban water management (Blackmore and Plant, 2008; Pahl-Wostl, 2007); integrated land use and transport planning (Newman et al., 2009); and urban design (Colding, 2007; Pickett et al., 2004). However, the degree to which social-ecological resilience per se informs these varies significantly across the publications. Research that does take an explicit social-ecological resilience approach to planning explores the mutual interest resilience and planning scholars share in collaborative deliberation as a way to improve society’s response to a wide range of surprises (see Goldstein, 2009); provides a practitioner’s perspective on the relevance of social-ecological resilience for metropolitan planning (see Wilkinson et al., 2010); and explores the potential of resilience as a metaphor to enable a reframing of inter-disciplinary integration between ecology, urban planning and urban design (Pickett et al., 2004). There has, however, been little engagement to date in the implications social-ecological resilience raises for planning theory per se. It is this research gap to which this paper contributes.
Three key tasks for planning theory are identified by Friedmann (2008) – the philosophical task, the task of adaptation and the task of translation. The latter of these – the task of translation – is the focus of this paper and here I explore the implications of knowledge and insights generated by resilience scholars for planning theory. Forester (1993: 1–2) argues that ‘powerful theories re-direct us toward problems and issues we might otherwise have ignored – or from which we have been ideologically or methodologically distracted’. The purpose in looking to social-ecological resilience then is to explore what problems and issues planning theory may have ignored with respect to our understanding of linked social-ecological systems. Whilst there are of course insights that social-ecological resilience can translate from planning theory, this is not the focus here.
The methodological approach taken to the challenge of translation is addressed in more detail in the following section of the paper. In the third section an overview of social-ecological resilience is provided. This establishes a context for a more detailed examination of the way each field conceptualizes the dynamics of change, human–nature relations and governance, where new insights for planning theory might be found and what critical issues it raises. The paper is then brought to a close with concluding remarks.
Approach to the challenge of translation
According to Friedmann, the task of translation is ‘to translate concepts and knowledges generated in other fields into our own domain, and to render them accessible and useful for planning and its practices’ (2008: 248). Other scholars have previously identified translation as a critical role for planning theory (see for example Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000: 338). Indeed, the history of planning theory is full of such translations, drawing from a wide range of sources. As Friedmann explains,
I see planning theorists actively engaged in mining expeditions into the universe of knowledge, on the lookout for concepts and ideas they believe to be of interest in planning education. Their specific contribution to theory is to return from these expeditions to home base and translate their discoveries into the language of planning where they will either take root or be unceremoniously forgotten. (Friedmann, 2008: 254)
The theoretical challenge of translating concepts from other disciplines into planning requires the following: ‘reasonable knowledge of both the source and the target domains, sufficient to enable a pertinent abstraction of key relational characteristics from within each; an effort to draw out and explicate key similarities and analogies; an effort to abstract and elucidate essential relational features, and also an attempt to explore the abstractions with relation to other theoretical work in the target domain’ (Chettiparamb, 2006: 78). This research is generally guided by this framework, although given the preliminary nature of this exploration it provides an overview rather than going into any depth when exploring relational features, instead focusing on identifying key issues and future research agendas. The source domain here is social-ecological resilience. The target domain is planning theory.
This research is based on a comprehensive literature review of both fields. Three key underlying assumptions of social-ecological resilience are identified, namely that social-ecological systems are linked, that linked social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems, and that building adaptive capacity for resilience is the key objective in governing linked social-ecological systems. These assumptions are placed in their broader context, of human–nature relations, the dynamics of change, and governance respectively, which are the structuring themes for the paper. I ask three questions with respect to each of these themes: How does social-ecological resilience conceptualize this? How does planning theory conceptualize this? What resulting issues for planning theory are raised? The purpose of doing this was twofold. First, to make explicit the ontological and epistemological assumptions embedded in social-ecological resilience. Second, to determine what issues social-ecological resilience raises for planning theory. The specific focus is on insights for planning theory per se and wherever possible the paper avoids making inferences for general planning scholarship.
Of course, both the domain of social-ecological resilience and the domain of planning theory are extensive and rapidly evolving, which is not unproblematic. A key challenge in engaging the resilience literature is that the concept of resilience has been extended to the degree that ‘both conceptual clarity and practical relevance are critically in danger’ (Brand and Jax, 2007: 22). This research is interested in social-ecological resilience. Social-ecological resilience is the ‘capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks, and therefore identity, that is, the capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity’ (Folke et al., 2010). The focus on social-ecological resilience is distinct from engineering resilience, social resilience or even ecological/ecosystem resilience (Adger, 2000; Folke, 2006: 259). The choice to focus on social-ecological resilience is deliberate as it is considered the most fruitful way to explore key gaps raised by planning theory scholars, in particular the need to pay more attention to matters of substance, and the specific call to address the implications of dynamic ecology in urban systems. This is not to say that other schools of resilience, including social resilience, community resilience and communicative resilience, are not of relevance for planning theory. Nor is it to deny the obvious relationships between them.
A key challenge in engaging the planning theory literature is that it means engaging with a fragmented and sometimes contradictory range of world views. In this respect a range of planning theories is drawn on, in particular those that share in some respect a non-linear or relational conceptualization of the dynamics of change, namely planning theories informed by complexity theories, post-structuralism and political economy. A distinction is made between critical planning theory (after Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000 and Flyvberg and Richardson, 2002) that is explanatory, analytical and conceptual and a descriptive or normative planning theory (see Yiftachel, 1989). In this paper, I pay attention to both and insights from social-ecological resilience for planning theory, critical and normative, are sought (after Watson, 2003).
Social-ecological resilience: An overview
Social-ecological resilience originates in ecology, when Holling (1973) challenged the fundamental assumptions of stability (and therefore predictability) as the primary characteristics of ecosystems and their management. Until then, a quantitative measurement of ‘stability’ (e.g. fixed quota for harvesting, maximum sustainable yield) had driven most ecosystem modelling and management efforts based on a world view that emphasized ‘equilibrium, the maintenance of a predictable world, and the harvesting of nature’s excess production with as little fluctuation as possible’ (Holling, 1973: 21). Accordingly, Holling (1978) argued that a management approach based on resilience would by contrast ‘emphasize the need to keep options open, the need to view events in a regional rather than a local context, and the need to emphasize heterogeneity’.
The concept of the adaptive cycle is central to social-ecological resilience. Holling introduced the adaptive cycle to describe the general characteristics of dynamic change in ecosystems as comprising four phases – exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Holling, 1986; Holling and Sanderson, 1996). The adaptive cycle challenges the traditional view of ecosystem succession as a linear process shifting from ‘exploitation, in which rapid colonization of recently disturbed areas is emphasized (to) conservation, in which slow accumulation and storage of energy and material are emphasized’ (Gunderson and Holling, 2002: 33). Berkes et al. (2003: 16) use the example of a forest which ‘goes through the stages of growth and maturity, followed by a disturbance, such as a fire, which releases the nutrients on the way to a new cycle of growth’, the point being that ‘forest succession should be seen, not as a unidirectional process … but as one phase of a cycle in which a forest grows, dies, and is renewed’ (Berkes et al., 2003: 17). By focusing only on the exploitation and conservation phases, natural resource management prioritized controlling disturbances (e.g. preventing/extinguishing forest fires) to increase short-term economic production, unaware of the impact these management choices have on the overall resilience of the relevant social-ecological systems. In the case of some forests, resilience is affected as some tree species require fire to release seeds for germination, and the longer a region goes without fire, the more intense and catastrophic the eventual fire event will be. Attention to the release and reorganization phases that follow periods of disturbance or crisis fundamentally challenged previous assumptions of equilibrium, stability and predictability in natural resource management. Gunderson and Holling (2002: 74) subsequently introduced the concept of ‘panarchies’ to ‘capture the adaptive and evolutionary nature of adaptive cycles that are nested one within the other across space and time scales’, thus emphasizing the importance of cross-scale dynamics.
Adaptability to change is a key focus for governing for social-ecological resilience in complex adaptive systems facing irreducible uncertainty. Social-ecological resilience offers the ideal process of adaptive co-management. Adaptive co-management refers to recent efforts to bring together two emerging approaches to natural resource management that attempt to deal better with uncertainties and complexities – ‘co-management’ (Holling, 1986), with its attention to matters of user participation in decision-making, and ‘adaptive management’, with its focus on ‘learning by doing in a scientific way to deal with uncertainty’ (Armitage et al., 2007: 1).
Interest in the concept of social-ecological resilience grew rapidly following Holling’s 1973 seminal publication (see Folke, 2006 for a summary) and there have been at several shifts in focus. The first important shift was towards an integrated approach to social-ecological systems. Human and natural systems are conceptualized as truly interlinked and interdependent systems and are thus defined as one system, a social-ecological system, with the separation between human and natural systems being a human construct that had immense impact in shaping our world views (Berkes et al., 2003). ‘Social’ here is used as a general term that includes social, cultural and economic systems (Berkes et al., 2003). The significance of this shift is that it has broadens the scope from ‘adaptive management of ecosystem feedbacks to understanding and accounting for the social dimension that creates barriers or bridges for ecosystem stewardship of dynamic landscapes and seascapes in times of change (Gunderson et al., 1995)’ (Folke et al., 2010: 4).
Whilst early resilience research drew on primarily empirically based local studies, there is now emerging scholarship focused at the global scale including recent publications on ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al., 2009), earth system governance (Duit et al., 2010), regime shifts (Biggs et al., 2009) and others. Research led by resilience scholars, recently identified nine planetary bio-physical boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009). The authors argue that these define a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity and that three of these – climate change, biodiversity and nitrogen load – have already been exceeded. In the article the scientists emphasize that, whilst climate change is currently receiving significant international attention, perhaps the greatest challenge is the interconnectivity of each of the nine and the non-linearity of causal relationships between them.
Identifying and generating better understanding of so-called ‘regime shifts’ is a significant focus of research concerned with identifying means for detecting and avoiding ecological regime shifts (Biggs et al., 2009; Brock and Carpenter, 2010; Scheffer et al., 2001). A regime shift is ‘a change in a system state from one regime or stability domain to another’ (Folke et al., 2010: 3). Undesirable ecological regime shifts include desertification, eutrophication of lakes, coral die-off (Scheffer et al., 2001) and of course global warming. Ecological regime shifts matter to social-ecological resilience because of the adverse and often unequal impact they have on communities. Early detection of regime shifts requires knowledge of thresholds. A threshold is ‘a level or amount of a controlling, often slowly changing variable in which a change occurs in a critical feedback causing the system to self-organize along a different trajectory, that is, towards a different attractor’ (Folke et al., 2010). Whilst ecologists focus on ‘means for detecting and avoiding ecological regime shifts’, they also call for ‘research on policy processes that are better suited to managing complex systems subject to regime shifts’ and argue that ‘such processes would reduce inertia and enable society to respond more rapidly to information about impending regime shifts, better account for the existence of policy windows when planning management interventions, and rely on leading indicators, rather than adverse environmental impacts, as triggers for management action’ (Biggs et al., 2009: 830).
Understanding processes of social-ecological transformation and transition is an emerging focus: ‘resilience is not only about being persistent or robust to disturbance. It is also about the opportunities that disturbance opens up in terms of recombination of evolved structures and processes, renewal of the system and emergence of new trajectories’ (Folke, 2006: 259). In this respect there is increasing dialogue between social-ecological resilience scholars (e.g. Olsson et al., 2006) and socio-technical transitions scholars (e.g. Smith and Stirling, 2010). Whilst it is recognized these two fields ‘conceptualise their objects of study in similar ways (van der Brugge and Van Raak, 2007; Foxon et al., 2009)’, it is recognized that both areas need to deal more fundamentally with the political dimensions of sustainability including questions over ‘who governs, whose systems framings count, and whose sustainability gets prioritized’ (Smith and Stirling, 2010: 1).
Social-ecological resilience is concurrently a scientific discipline, a governance approach and an increasingly important urban policy discourse. The following sections critically explore the implications of the central underlying assumptions of social-ecological resilience, namely how dynamics of change, human–nature relations and governance are conceptualized. The focus here is on what, if any, new conceptual ground social-ecological resilience offers planning theory and what broader issues are raised for planning theory.
Human–nature relations
How does social-ecological resilience conceptualize human–nature relations?
Social-ecological resilience is based on the assumption that ecological systems and social-economic systems are linked (Berkes et al., 2003; Folke, 2006; Gunderson and Holling, 2002). Resilience scholars position this assumption in stark contrast to traditional approaches which saw mainstream ecology exclude humans, and social science ignore the environment in its focus on human systems (Berkes et al., 2003: 9). They argue that it is only in recent decades that fields such as ecological economics, environmental ethics and political ecology have challenged this approach (Berkes et al., 2002). As Folke (2006: 253) explains, ‘old dominant perspectives have implicitly assumed a stable and infinitely resilient environment where resource flows could be controlled and nature would self-repair into equilibrium when human stressors were removed.’ Social-ecological resilience, by contrast, recognizes that the nature of cross-scale interactions means that human stressors cannot simply be removed as human–nature relations are increasingly complex and generate global as well as local and regional ecological impacts which cannot simply be reversed (Turner et al., 2003; Walker et al., 2009). Social-ecological resilience critiques assumptions that ignore the linked characteristic of social-ecological systems,
[it is often assumed that] if the social system performs adaptively or is well organized institutionally it will also manage the environmental resource base in a sustainable fashion. A human society may show great ability to cope with change and adapt if analyzed only through the social dimension lens. But such an adaptation may be at the expense of changes in the capacity of ecosystems to sustain the adaptation (Smit and Wandel, 2006), and may generate traps and breakpoints in the resilience of a social-ecological system (Gunderson and Holling, 2002). (Folke, 2006)
Given that social-ecological resilience is primarily concerned with the governance of ‘linked social-ecological systems’, how then do urban resilience scholars use this concept? In many respects it is a broad framing device. There are, however, several increasingly focused attempts at formalizing various analytical approaches. For example the concept of ecosystem services is generally used to capture the linked relationship between human systems and ecological systems. Ecosystem services (ESS) are ‘the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems, and the species that make them up, sustain and fulfill human life’ (Daily, 1997). Ecological economists have undertaken valuation studies of urban ecosystem services to increase awareness of the ecosystems on which people living in cities depend. In Stockholm, for example, research establishes the ecosystem areas required for accumulating the total emissions of CO2 generated by traffic and other anthropogenic sources, both within the city and outside of it (Jansson and Nohrstedt, 2001). Ethnographic studies of urban gardening show that social-ecological memory is critical to resilience of biodiversity and in particular pollination services critical for food production (Barthel et al., 2010). Methods now exist to analyse tradeoffs between different bundles of ESS (Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010). This is important because tradeoffs between different ESS affect the resilience of social-ecological systems (Rodriguez et al., 2006). In the USA, two Long Term Ecological Research Network urban projects, in Baltimore and Phoenix, are grappling with how to make analysable a linked ‘social-ecological system’ (SES). The difficulty of establishing a strong cross-disciplinary ‘theoretical basis or research agenda for coupling nature and human systems’ is recognized by scholars involved in this project (Redman et al., 2004) who acknowledge that ‘standard ecological theories are insufficient to address the complexity of human culture, behaviour, and institutions’ (Grimm and Redman, 2004: 13 as summarized in Evans, 2011: 228).
How does this relate to the way planning theory conceptualizes human–nature relations?
Issues of human–nature interaction are central to the very process of human settlement, urbanization and well-being. Ever since the establishment of the very first permanent settlements following the shift from nomadic to agrarian-based living, ecosystem services have been critical to the capacity of those settlements to survive and indeed thrive (Daily, 1997; Redman, 1999). Access to fresh water, reliable food and energy sources, and construction materials has been essential. Yet archaeology reveals repeated examples of urban civilizations exceeding the limits of accessible ecosystem services.
Among the more severe human-induced environmental impacts are those associated with ancient urban societies, whose dense populations, rising rates of consumption, and agricultural intensification led to regional degradation so extreme that cities were abandoned and the productive potential of entire civilizations was undermined to the point of ruin. (Grimm et al., 2000 : 572)
It is not surprising therefore that there are well-known and established bodies of research exploring human–nature relations in and of cities, from disciplines including geography, history, archaeology and of course planning. Indeed, there is a long history of attention to human–nature relations through design and planning practice. Since the emergence of town planning as a discipline, human–nature relations have been highlighted through the Chicago School of planning, the early British town planners such as Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and his influence on Lewis Mumford and later on through more detailed practice-based attention of how to design with nature (McHarg, 1969). From the 1970s, environmental planning emerged as a sub-discipline (Slocombe, 1993). More recently this relationship is explored through the sustainability discourse (e.g. Owens and Cowell, 2002; Rydin, 2010) and emergence of climate change.
However, when attention is turned to the planning theory literature per se, there is arguably minimal attention to the implications of ecological considerations as a primary concern. This is not to say that these issues haven’t been dealt with at all, but that contributions seem to be limited compared to the extensive focus on the trajectory of planning theories from rationalist and critical through to collaborative and post-positivist. Areas where planning theory has specifically taken up matters of human–nature relations regard environmental ethics and political ecology. In addition, in relatively recent years increasing attention is being paid to what a relational understanding of social-ecological processes means for planning theory (e.g. Hillier, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2010).
Environmental ethics is of import for planning theory because it critically informs the difficult choices and tradeoffs society must make to address serious environmental problems (Beatley, 1989; Jacobs, 1995). It is not suggested that planners be the ones to decide ‘what the morally correct or ethical environmental decision is’, but that ‘they are certainly in a position to put forth, and cause to be considered, key questions in arriving at an environmental ethic’ (Beatley, 1989: 26). Some of these issues are taken up in brief by subsequent planning theorists. For example, Healey (1997: 164) raises the issue of ‘moral responsibilities for those who cannot speak for themselves, other species and future generations’ and Wilson and Piper (2010: 120) suggest that climate change radically extends attention to the longer-term future at the same time as ‘throwing into greater relief the problems of ensuring equitable outcomes of plans and planning decisions both now and in the future’.
Political ecology is relevant for planning theory because ‘society must consider the environmental crisis as one of ideological and political as well as ethical and moral origins’ (Harrill, 1999: 68). From this perspective, it is argued that a progressive or radical form of planning is required in order to transform ‘the social and political structures hindering sustainability’ (Harrill, 1999: 72). This transformation must occur in spite of the very present risk that as economic conditions decline so does the capacity to negotiate sustainable development gains, including ecological outcomes (Davoudi et al., 2009; Rydin, 2010) and in face of the systematic depoliticization of social-ecological governance (Swyngedouw, 2010). In an insightful piece in Ashgate’s most recent Research Compendium to Planning Theory, Swyngedouw (2010: 312–14) urges that planning intervention be seen as ‘irredeemably violent engagements that re-choreograph socio-natural relations and assemblages’ and as such must be accompanied by ‘democractic agonistic struggle over the content of socio-ecological life’, struggles he argues are being replaced by ‘techno-managerial planning, expert management and administration’.
Issues for planning theory
Social-ecological resilience scholarship significantly under-theorizes power, politics and conflict (Evans, 2011; Hornborg, 2009), a point increasingly acknowledged within the field (Folke et al., 2010) and beginning to be addressed in relation to urban systems (e.g. Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete, 2011). For planning theory this matters in many ways. How human–nature relations are conceptualized significantly informs the basis for governance of social-ecological systems. It informs what and whose knowledge matters and to what end this knowledge is put. Significantly, it also critically informs how the analysis of social-ecological systems is approached through research.
However, what social-ecological resilience scholarship does increasingly well is to expose aspects of the materiality of the ecological condition from a perspective that recognizes that social-ecological systems are linked, thus highlighting both society’s critical impact and dependence on ecosystems. It does this at both the local scale (e.g. the role of social-ecological memory in maintaining biodiversity in urban gardens in Stockholm) (Barthel et al., 2010) and the global scale. At the global scale, through the identification of nine planetary boundaries, it reminds us of the planetary biophysical limits necessary for human survival, and expands our gaze to include not only climate change but other ecologically significant wicked problems, including biodiversity loss and ocean acidification (Rockström et al., 2009). Importantly, it emphasizes the connectivity of these problems across scales (Walker et al., 2009). I argue that this type of social-ecological resilience research is of significant interest at a time when planning theorists are calling for more attention to substantive matters alongside matters of process. While ecological considerations are undoubtedly of increasing importance for planning practice (Davoudi et al., 2010; Murdoch, 2006), planning theory appears to have paid minimal attention to them. Social-ecological resilience turns our attention in planning theory to critical substantive matters of the impact of planning approaches, methods and decisions on ecosystem services.
Dynamics of change
How does social-ecological resilience conceptualize the dynamics of change?
The ontological assumption that linked social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems (Levin, 1999; Walker and Salt, 2006) is central to the way social-ecological resilience conceptualizes the dynamics of change. Complex adaptive systems are governed by non-linear causality and have ‘the ability to adapt and co-evolve as they organize through time’ (Urry, 2005: 3). Complexity theory challenges reductionism, teaches us that effects can have an ‘irreducible tangle of causes’ (Coveney and Highfield, 1995), and so undermines claims to predictability and controllability. Social-ecological resilience applies complexity theory to linked social-ecological systems and relies significantly, but by no means exclusively, on systems-based analytical tools to understand relational dynamics in these systems (Wilkinson, 2010). The concern in social-ecological resilience research is most often to improve understanding of the dynamics of a particular social-ecological system with a view to informing management of that system towards a desirable trajectory. Establishing historical disturbance regimes, feedback relationships, alternate states or regime shifts, thresholds, cross-scale dynamics as well as future scenarios are thus important.
The adaptive cycle (described earlier) is a central metaphor that well captures the way social-ecological resilience conceptualizes the dynamics of change. One of the key points being that disturbances, shocks or surprises are to be expected in social-ecological systems and that resilience is enhanced by acknowledging and governing for this. For social-ecological resilience, surprises ‘range from sudden, rapid, discrete, and irreversible disasters to more gradual and insidious events, such as climate change … (and) also encompass incremental, discontinuous, and spatially heterogeneous events like declining agricultural productivity, as well as events that escape notice because they are novel or occur imperceptibly over generations’ (Goldstein, 2009: 5). Surprises can be both ‘external to a community and endogenous to it’; they are ‘sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial’ (Goldstein, 2009: 5). They can be harmful where they act as triggers for regime shift change or ‘mark thresholds for system transformation’ to a less desirable system configuration (Goldstein, 2009: 5). The consequence here is not only that a less desirable system results but that because of non-linear dynamics, regime shifts can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to reverse. It is recognized that adaptive cycles are nested across scales and thus cross-scale coordination is critical to successfully navigating towards desired trajectories (Cash et al., 2006; Gunderson and Holling, 2002).
Whilst complexity theory is the ontological starting point for the way social-ecological resilience conceptualizes the dynamics of change, there is increasing cross-disciplinary exploration with fields including social innovation (e.g. Biggs et al., 2010), social-technical transitions (e.g. Smith and Stirling, 2010) and geography (Evans, 2011; Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete, 2011).
How does this relate to the way planning theory conceptualizes the dynamics of change?
There are several different ways in which planning theory conceptualizes change, depending on the philosophical starting point. Certainly complexity theory, with its conceptualization of the dynamics of change, is not new to planning scholarship. Indeed in 1971, only two years before writing his seminal paper on resilience, Holling co-authored a paper that sought to demonstrate the ‘remarkable similarities’ between the characteristics of ecologies and cities – most notably their functioning as ‘interdependent systems, their dependence on a succession of historical events, their spatial linkages, and their non-linear structure’ (Holling and Goldberg, 1971). This is essentially an early attempt to demonstrate that the dynamics of change in urban systems exhibit the characteristics of complex adaptive systems. Since then, there is considerable planning research that uses complexity theory as a frame for analysis of dynamics in urban systems (see for example Allen, 1997; Batty and Longley, 1994; De Roo and Silva, 2010; Portugali, 1999). Each of the key complexity theories has now been applied to urban systems and urban research has generated dissipative cities, synergetic cities, fractal cities, agent-based cities, cellular automata cities, sandpile cities and network cities (Portugali, 2010). The most basic finding from this body of work is the confirmation that cities exhibit patterns of behaviour associated with complex adaptive systems and that urban systems are in fact dual self-organizing systems where the parts (or agents) themselves are also complex adaptive systems with ‘cognitive capabilities such as learning, thinking, decision-making and the like’ (Portugali, 2008: 257).
Planning theory, however, draws on several different philosophical traditions, several of which also share a relational, dynamic and non-linear conceptualization of change, but which give more explicit attention to the location of power. Two obvious approaches in this respect that share commonality with complexity theories (see Sheppard, 2008) and are taken up by planning theorists are relational dialectics (after Harvey, 1996) and post-structural assemblages (see, for example, Hillier, 2007). From a political ecology perspective, for example, Swygedeow (2010: 313) draws out the political implications for planning of ‘diverse, multiple, whimsical, contingent and often unpredictable social-ecological relations of which we are a part’. He ‘urges us to accept the extraordinary variability of natures, insists on the need to make “a wager” on natures, forces us to choose politically between this rather than that nature, invites us to plunge into the relatively unknown, expect the unexpected, accept that not all there is can be known, and most importantly, fully endorse the violent moment that is inscribed in any concrete or real socio-environmental intervention’ (Swyngedeow, 2010: 313).
Issues for planning theory
Of late, planning theorists have been encouraged to turn their mind to important matters of substance. They have also been urged to find better ways to deal with the ‘complex, chaotic, often unpredictable, radically contingent, historically and geographically variable, risky, patterned in endlessly complex ways’ characteristics of nature (Swyngedeow, 2010). I argue that social-ecological resilience scholarship engages both these challenges and in this respect provides a useful field for more detailed examination by planning theorists. Social-ecological resilience scholarship applies a complex adaptive, non-linear conceptualization of the dynamics of change to the materiality of linked social-ecological processes. It provides substantive examples of how cross-scale impacts reverberate across social-ecological systems in unpredictable ways, reducing with inequitable consequences the resilience of ecosystem services on which societies depend. It also demonstrates that regime shifts to less desirable ecological states can be difficult if not impossible to reverse. This raises the urgency of precautionary governance in matters that affect the decline of ecosystem services, across scales, including in urban systems.
However, as mentioned already, social-ecological resilience is yet to develop a strong theoretical base for addressing matters of power, conflict, contradiction and culture (Evans, 2011; Hornborg, 2009: 255; Lélé, 1998; Nadasdy, 2007). This is essential for a critical account of the dynamics of change in complex urban systems and a substantial gap to be aware of in any attempt to translate social-ecological resilience to planning theory. The absence of such an account exposes social-ecological resilience to the criticism that it depoliticizes the dynamics of change in social-ecological systems, something planning theorists alert us to and caution against (Swyngedouw, 2010: 302).
One specific area of interest for planning theory that emerges with respect to the way social-ecological resilience conceptualizes the dynamics of change regards the role of surprise, sometimes also called disturbance, crisis or shock in the social-ecological resilience literature. By ‘assuming change and explaining stability, instead of assuming stability and explaining change’ (van der Leeuw, 2000) the attempt to ‘defeat disorder’ (Gleeson, 2008: 2658) inherent in traditional planning approaches is challenged and the ‘science of surprise’ is prioritized. With its central metaphor of the adaptive cycle, attention is drawn in particular to the ‘backloop’ and the capacity to recover following surprises or disturbances. In a recent evaluation of how spatial strategies conceptualize space and place, Davoudi and Strange (2009: 224) conclude that ‘in all case study strategies a reasonably well-understood contemporary context is uncritically projected into a future sheltered from any radical or uncomfortable shocks’. They go on to generalize that ‘in the formulaic world of contemporary planning, there seems to be little room for novelty and surprise’ (Davoudi and Strange, 2009: 243). This is despite increasing attention to and examples of natural disturbances such as bush fires, flooding, earthquakes or heatwaves, and their often devastating impact on cities. Social-ecological resilience shows both how multiple or sustained disturbance reduces the resilience of social-ecological systems but also how disturbance can become the source of innovation (see Goldstein, 2009 and Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete, 2011).
Governance
How does social-ecological resilience conceptualize governance?
Social-ecological resilience is concerned with the governance of linked social-ecological systems. Generating adaptive capacity to cope with change is a central normative focus because the ability to be able to respond to the non-linear dynamics of change characteristic of complex adaptive systems is critical. Generating adaptive capacity relates both to matters of process and matters of substantive action.
With respect to process, adaptive co-management is advocated. Adaptive co-management relies on rapid feedback of updated scientific information about the natural resource to inform adjustments to the management of the system by engaged stakeholders (Armitage et al., 2007). Four institutional prescriptions for adaptive co-management have been identified: ‘collaboration in a polycentric governance system, public participation, an experimental approach to resource management, and management at the bioregional scale’ (Huitema et al., 2009). Adaptive co-management encourages collaborative learning and decision-making processes (Goldstein, 2009) and ‘safe-fail experiments’ (Ahern, 2011). Adaptive co-management remains an ideal whose effectiveness is yet to be proven (Huitema et al., 2009). It turns out that ‘despite the intuitive appeal of adaptive management, it has frequently failed in practice owing to social and institutional barriers (Stankey et al., 2003; Walters, 1997)’ (as cited in Fischer et al., 2009; see also Berkes et al., 2007). The wicked nature of many natural resource management policy challenges presents significant barriers to achieving the aspired adaptability (Sandström, 2010) and challenges the somewhat ‘naïve’ belief social-ecological resilience places in institutional design to resolve tragedies of the commons in natural resource management (Goldstein, 2009).
With respect to substantive action there are several ‘strategies for resilience’ that can be distilled from the social-ecological resilience literature and its as yet minimal application to urban systems (Ahern, 2011; Newman et al., 2009; Wardekker et al., 2009; Wilkinson et al., 2010). These relate strongly to the adaptive cycle and comprise ‘practices that evoke change, that survive change, and that nurture sources for reorganization following change’ (Folke et al., 2005: 446). As detailed in Figure 1, the four broad ‘strategies for resilience’ are: to assume change and uncertainty; to nurture conditions for recovery and renewal after disturbance; to combine different types of knowledge for learning; and to create opportunities for self-organization. Early research in planning settings and with planning practitioners indicates these strategies for resilience prioritize different types of actions, including redundancy, adaptability and less-hierarchical approaches (Wardekker et al., 2009; Wilkinson et al., 2010).
Strategies for Resilience
How does this relate to the way planning theory conceptualizes governance?
Social-ecological resilience scholarship and the field of planning share an interest in collaborative deliberation (Goldstein, 2009). Planning theory pays significant attention to collaborative planning as a way to deal with the limits of knowledge through process and dialogue (Forester, 1999; Healey, 2006; Innes, 1995; Innes and Booher, 2010). This assumption generates ongoing debate with planning theorists who challenge collaborative processes based on Habermasian assumptions of conditions for ideal speech and argue that such processes disguise the conflictual politics and power struggles inevitable in planning processes (Flyvberg, 1998; Flyvberg and Richardson, 2002; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000). Drawing instead on Foucauldian notions of power and rationality, they encourage attention by those involved in governance processes to exercise reflexive situated ethical judgements in face of power. Other planning theory scholars also argue that ‘planning theory should start from the assumption of a conflict model of society, rather than the prevailing consensus model’ and that ‘work in planning theory that argues for an “agonistic” view of society – the “permanence of conflict, non-reciprocity and domination” (Hillier, 2003; p. 37) – has begun to move in this direction’ (Watson, 2009: 2267). As yet there is not an equivalent theoretical debate or awareness in the social-ecological resilience literature. Whilst not the primary focus of this paper, this is an area where resilience scholars would be well encouraged to seek insights from planning theory.
The central dilemma of how to act in a relational world of constant dynamic non-linear change (or ‘becoming’) is shared by both social-ecological resilience and recent post-structural planning theorists, who also suggest ‘experimentation’ as a way forward and advocate the need to adaptively navigate towards desired trajectories (Hillier, 2007; see also Amin and Thrift, 2002; Murdoch, 2006). Social-ecological resilience prioritizes governance of natural resources through ‘learning by doing’ with ‘safe-fail’ experiments. This governance approach is highly dependent on technical information about the social-ecological system, the capacity to experiment and maintain feedback processes that can be acted upon. The role of what information and whose knowledge counts through such learning process is also a matter long discussed by planning theorists (Friedmann, 1987; Sandercock, 1998).
Issues for planning theory
I argue that one of the most pressing issues for planning theory regarding social-ecological resilience scholarship is to examine its implications for how governance of urban systems is framed. Of course, one of the limitations in looking for insights from social-ecological resilience for planning theory with respect to governance is that there are few empirical studies researching a case in urban settings where a social-ecological resilience approach informed ongoing planning processes. This is somewhat surprising given the increasing importance of resilience as an urban policy discourse.
Planning has been defined as the ‘framing of problems’ or ‘organizing attention to possibilities’ and the challenge of ‘how analysts organize attention (as) the central political problem of their practice’ (Forester, 1989: 19). As I have shown, social-ecological resilience frames governance challenges in particular ways. Social-ecological systems are linked. Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems. Resilience (defined in particular ways by particular people) becomes the normative goal to be pursued through adaptive co-management engaging various ‘strategies for resilience’. This framing encourages a systemic, whole-of-systems perspective and a precautionary approach which preliminary empirical research with planning practitioners shows has significant potential to change mindsets and challenge the status quo (Wilkinson, unpublished). However, at the same time there are several issues that planning theorists must be alert to here. The first concerns the object of governance, namely ‘social-ecological systems’. Evans argues that ‘seeing the city as a [social-ecological system] threatens to de-politicise urban transition, not so much by colonizing arenas of governance with expert knowledge (à la Modernism), but by constraining governance within a technocratic mode that remains inured to the tropes of scientific legitimacy’. A second issue concerns the mode of governance. By placing so much attention on experimentation, a social-ecological resilience approach is necessarily local in focus, even whilst it remains attentive to cross-scale issues. This precludes from view attention to deeper structural causes of problems and thus runs the risk of ‘fiddling whilst Rome burns’ (Vale and Campenalla, 2005, cited in Evans, 2011: 232).
Conclusions
In this paper I explored the relevance of social-ecological resilience for planning theory by examining how the underlying assumptions of social-ecological resilience relate to planning theory. Three aspects are examined, namely human–nature relations, dynamics of change and governance. I argue that social-ecological resilience is of relevance for planning theory in several ways but that it is no panacea and must be critically examined.
Social-ecological resilience scholarship holds the potential to contribute to addressing concerns of planning theorists that matters of substance have been overlooked. Despite human–nature relations and their spatiality being central to planning practice, planning theory hasn’t paid significant or sustained attention to the ecological dimension. Why is this so? And what can be done about this by planning theorists? With its origins in systems ecology and emerging interest in the inter-disciplinary examination of the governance of linked social-ecological systems, social-ecological resilience offers a field of scholarship of particular relevance for planning theory at a time when global ecological challenges require urgent attention. Social-ecological resilience highlights the interconnectedness and difficulty of governance of wicked problems in complex and linked social-ecological systems and ties this to the spectre of our shared survival. I argue that social-ecological resilience is worth more attention by planning theorists in a context where over two decades of effort on governing for sustainability hasn’t in any substantive ways stopped the decline in ecosystem services. It is the way social-ecological resilience frames the challenges facing linked social-ecological systems that holds interest for much-needed planning theory scholarship that places this as a central concern. How can more attention be paid to substantive matters, such as matters of ecology, in ways that sufficiently recognize the materiality of human–nature relations as well as sufficiently theorize the causes and potential sources for sustainable transformation? This is not a new challenge, but one to which I suggest social-ecological resilience can contribute.
That said, planning theorists should also be alert to attempts to co-opt social-ecological resilience in ways that continue avoidance of ecological issues (Wilkinson et al., 2010). Brand and Jax (2007: 6) observe that ‘ resilience is a two-faced concept’, being used on the one hand as a ‘descriptive, ecological concept’ and on the other hand as ‘a boundary object with a rather wide and vague meaning’. As social-ecological resilience is increasingly translated into the planning field, clarity around the manner in which it is being used is important. I argue that taking on board the broad conceptual power of resilience as a metaphor without working through the implications of the ecological message contained therein is a lost opportunity that planning theorists cannot afford if it is to contribute to improved urban governance at a time of ecological crisis.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Libby Porter, Jonathan Metzer, Stockholm Resilience Centre colleagues, Luleå University of Technology colleagues, and the anonymous reviews for their constructive comments and suggestions on prior drafts of this paper. The financial support of Formas, Urban-Net and Mistra is gratefully acknowledged.