Resilience, more than just a word
One of the things about returning to academia is a reminder of the focus on the accurate use of terminology. This week, in readings on ‘resilience’, this situation came to the fore.
‘Resilience’ is defined differently depending on a discipline’s perspective (Saunders, Becker, 2015). This can be a positive or a negative. The positive impact one of creating a shared point from which to work in a transdisciplinary way (Hassler, Kohler, 2014. p119), the negative, that diverse definitions can ‘water down’ the impact and meaning (Hassler, Kohler, 2014. p119).
There are so many examples of this terminology hijacking that I can recall:
- Architects hate the term information architecture.
- Curators in art museums hate that curate is now used as a verb.
- Jim Henson resents incompetent politicians being called muppets.
Perhaps the last one is stretching the truth, but my point should be clear. The use of terminology is a political act which reveals deeply held beliefs of ownership.
In the end, I wonder if it truly matters if one is able to achieve positive benefits to society and the planet? Maybe we should be happy for resilience as a term to be used differently if the end point is agreement around radical action to impede climate disaster.
Oh—but wait—isn’t that ‘sustainability’?
Let’s refer to the definitions (ones I prefer).
- Resilience is “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events” (National Research Council, 2012).
- Sustainability is defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland Commission).
Redman further delineates the terms by comparing resilience to adaptation and sustainability to transformation. Using this definition it appears that my call for radical action is sustainability not resilience.
A further point of interest from this week’s lecture was that resilience interventions are often more palatable for politicians because they are perceived as less radical than those defined as belonging to sustainability. Politicians would prefer to chip around the edges of a problem rather than implementing what Redman (2014) calls “a more pervasive and radical reorganization of the social-ecological system” which is necessary to reduce the impact of climate change.
I have to agree with this sentiment. It appears that not only are our politicians happy to implement smaller, resilience initiatives—we as a society are more than happy to let them do that.
I do hope that the school children of the world will achieve a little more impact than we’ve managed to. The climate strike tomorrow (March 15) around the world is a call-to-action from children to adults. They are striking from school to “tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is — a crisis” (School Strike for Climate website).
REFERENCES
Hassler, U. & Kohler, N. 2014, “Resilience in the built environment”, Building Research & Information, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 119–129.
Marchese, D., Reynolds, E., Bates, M.E., Morgan, H., Clark, S.S. & Linkov, I. 2018, “Resilience and sustainability: Similarities and differences in environmental management applications”, The Science of the total environment, vol. 613–614, pp. 1275.
National Research Council, 2012. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (2012). National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
Redman, C.L. 2014, “Should sustainability and resilience be combined or remain distinct pursuits?”, Ecology and Society, vol. 19, no. 2.
Saunders, W. & Becker, J. 2015, “A discussion of resilience and sustainability: Land use planning recovery from the Canterbury earthquake sequence, New Zealand”, International Journal Of Disaster Risk Reduction, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 73–81.
