Adapting Resilience Science to Community Well-Being, Part 3
Resilience as the ability to navigate the full community lifecycle
In my last article I mentioned that a capacity for learning is required for a community to successfully navigate “the inevitable cycles of growth, conservation, collapse, and reorganization driven by external social and environmental changes.”
I didn’t choose those cycles at random. They come from the “adaptive cycle” model of ecosystem dynamics introduced in 1986 by C.S. Holling1 and tweaked in 2011 by Burkhard et al.2 According to the model, as ecosystems adjust to changes in external conditions, they cycle through four phases: growth or exploitation, conservation or equilibrium, collapse or release, and reorganization.
Resilience is the ability to successfully navigate all four of those phases without falling apart. How to manage an ecosystem to accomplish that is the topic of the second paper.3
The basic idea is that, by understanding each of the four phases, we can better understand what goals we need to pursue, what traps or pitfalls we may encounter, and what resources and strategies can help us pursue the goals and avoid the traps.
Keep in mind that all of these phases, while initially developed in the context of natural ecosystems, apply also to social systems, including regions, communities, and even individual organizations.
I’ll give a brief overview of the four phases and then discuss why such a model is relevant, even vital right now.
The Adaptive Cycle
Growth Phase
The growth or exploitation phase is when an ecosystem is just starting or is very young. It may be new or just coming out of a significant re-organization. The goal at this stage is to grow. This phase is “often marked by abundant resources and entrepreneurial leadership,” a system “brimming with untapped and uncommitted potentiality.” It’s during this phase that key connections and dependencies are established and that trust is built.
The main pitfall here is the classic “poverty trap:” the system can never really get going because there are insufficient resources to activate and maintain growth until self-sustaining processes organize. A second trap lurks on the other end: the system is activated and growing, but never matures, instead continuing the relentless resource acquisition that characterizes the growth phase, eventually overshooting the limits of sustainability and collapsing without ever achieving equilibrium.
Equilibrium Phase
The equilibrium phase is the stage of maturity. It is characterized by stability, balance, and controlled development that fosters qualitative over quantitative change, elaboration over growth. Innovation continues to create new networks and information flows that make better use of available resources, but it is driven more by resource constraints than resource abundance. Ecosystems in this phase tend to form high levels of structure and organization.
The main danger in this phase is the “rigidity trap:” over-refined processes and structures that leave little room for innovation. “Characteristics of a rigid system include very few key nodes with a high concentration of influence, and low diversity both in nodes and pathways” (nodes represent people or organizations; pathways are the connections through which information, resources, and energy flow).
A system caught in the rigidity trap violates both circulation and structure principles from the last article. Signs that we may be in or entering such a trap are fairly obvious in the U.S. right now.
Collapse Phase
Mature systems can withstand or recover from disturbances that fall within their tolerance range. Eventually, however, the system is pushed by a crisis beyond that range and ceases to be viable. It then enters the collapse or release phase, characterized by a breakdown of existing structures and processes and by resource loss. The test for the system in this stage is its ability to “maintain vital functions throughout the crises.”
The key trap here is the "dissolution trap” in which cascading failures and a lack of adaptable leadership lead to complete collapse of the system.
Reorganization Phase
The reorganization phase is the chance for renewal, the formation of a new system that likely repurposes components and connections from the old one, but reconfigures and reorients them, escaping the free-fall of the collapse phase and creating an opportunity for a new growth phase.
The main danger here is falling into the “vagabond trap” where so many nodes and connections have been lost that the system lacks the information it needs to reconfigure itself or lacks the components it needs to form a new system. In a community these might be key connecting people and organizations that have left or shut down.
What Next?
So how does this model apply to us?
It’s difficult to say just what phase a whole community is in – we live within complex hierarchies of interconnected and overlapping systems. Nevertheless, I see clear signs that, whatever equilibria have been established at the international, national, or local levels over the last 100 years, all of them today are under severe stress at best or, at worst, have transitioned to an early collapse phase.
So the question is: what can we do to help our systems navigate the changes coming at us and to break through eventually to reorganization, renewal, and re-growth?
For me, the insights from the papers I’ve been discussing point to two critical tasks.
The first is simply to strengthen every aspect of our community ecosystem that we can, following the principles laid out in the previous article. If we are indeed in a transition from equilibrium to collapse, it may be important to focus on some over others, but in the long run all of them are important – they are the resources needed to navigate both immediate and future changes.
To accomplish that strengthening, we need to build our capacity to recognize and assess the current state of each of the characteristics outlined in the last article and to identify available strategies to strengthen them, including those suggested by Dr. Lengnick in her book on resilient agriculture.
The second task is tied specifically to the collective learning characteristic, which the previous paper emphasized as the “most important regenerative principle.” In their discussion, the authors specifically talk about navigating the adaptive cycle outlined here as the purpose of learning. While they did not offer a way to measure a system’s ability to learn, the authors concluded that the best way to assess whether it was learning was to use indices based on the very kind of community indicators that I’ve discussed in previous articles.
So the second task is to work collectively to develop and learn to use such indicators as an integral part of our policy- and decision-making.
These tasks are urgent, not just because of everything that is happening around us, but in western North Carolina specifically because the disaster recovery funds being deployed by the City of Asheville and by surrounding counties over the next few years represent our best opportunity to make these investments at scale.
Each of us can contribute, whether through advocacy to ensure that recovery funds are used to build resilience, by building connections and collaborations that strengthen the fabric of our communities, or by strengthening our community’s capacity to learn and adapt. My own focus will likely be on some combination of the last two – stay tuned.
This is the last in a three-part series on network flow science and its application to improving community health, based on recent academic papers. The first article is here and the second is here.
Links & Thoughts
In Uncertain Times, Get Curious. Asking questions is obviously vital to learning. Some research suggests that curiosity and questions can also “serve as an antidote to the anxiety that can arise in times of great uncertainty.” Good to know if we ever find ourselves in such times :).
Lessons from Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking. One of the lessons I’ve taken from my work with nonprofits funded by the City of Asheville’s American Rescue Plan Act dollars is that grantmaking needs to focus on learning more than “success.” It turns out that the Siegel Family Endowment in New York City does precisely that. This article distills 10 lessons from their experience.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.
Holling, C.S. 1986. The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change. Pages 292-317 in W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn, editors. Sustainable Development of the Biosphere. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2011.05.016.
Burkhard, B., B. D. Fath, and F. Müller. 2011. Adapting the adaptive cycle: hypotheses on the development of ecosystem properties and services. Ecological Modelling 222(16):2878-2890).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2011.05.016.
Fath, B. D., C. A. Dean, and H. Katzmair. 2015. “Navigating the adaptive cycle: an approach to managing the resilience of social systems.” Ecology and Society 20(2): 24.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07467-200224.