Figure 1. Disaster Community and Non-Disaster Community Development Paths. (Based on Lew et al., 2018)

The figure above is one that I developed toward the end of the Taiwan rural resilience research project that is reported on this website. This particular figure is mostly based on the discussion of sustainable and resilient communities by Lew et al., 2018. I have used this figure in several academic presentations on community resilience in the past couple of years, with the most recent being at Ritsumekan Asia Pacific University, in Beppu, Kyushu, Japan (Lew, 2019), but have otherwise not formally published it ... until now.

The figure shows the development paths of two types of communities that we encountered in our research in Taiwan. Three of our communities had experienced major natural disasters (earthquake, flooding or both) in recent memory, while three communities had not experienced a natural disaster within the memory or stories of current residents. The development path model starts with both community types at a base Stage 1 condition. The disaster community experiences a steep decline in functioning conditions, whereas the non-disaster community experiences a gradual decline through the entropy of aging infrastructure, facilities and services. Without intervention, each would reach a degree of degradation in Stage 2, which would be much deeper in the disaster community than the non-disaster community.

Functioning as a self-organizing and self-sustaining system, all communities will respond to their degradation at some point, although some may respond sooner than others. For the disaster community, the dominant response is likely to reflect a high degree of resilience practices. These come for central government recovery funds, as well as self-organizing recovery responses by local residents. The non-disaster community, on the other hand, does not have access to recovery funds and has less motivation for a strong self-organizing response to gradual degradation, and the nature of its responses reflect this.

In general, we refer to the non-disaster responses as "sustainability practices" because they are mostly trying to sustain a status quo while moving through incremental shifts toward community improvement over the long term. Resilience recovery responses tend to be more innovative, with more of an acceptance of large, short term changes to a local economy and culture. This was clearly evident in the community interviews we conducted in Taiwan. The disaster communities were more likely to have undergone a shift in their economies (with tourism being a major new product), that was driven by new ideas generated by both local residents and newcomers who moved to the communities initially to provide disaster relief, and then decided to stay for the long term. The disaster communities were also much more adept at securing government grants for a variety of short and long term projects than were the less organized and less socially cohesive non-disaster communities.

However, even small rural communities can be complex in their social and political relationships. We try to capture this by using the symbol "Rs" to indicate emphasis on resilience practices primarily, but with also some ongoing sustainability practices, as well. The "Sr" symbol is the opposite, with an emphasis on sustainability practices, but with some awareness and utilization of resilience opportunities and initiatives.

In Stage 3, each type of community returns to a stage that is somewhat similar in functions the initial Stage 1. If properly planned and managed, non-disaster communities never really exhibit a Stage 2 decline because maintenance needs are regularly cared for. As such, they maintain their status quo in moving from Stage 1 to Stage 3. In either event, the next question is what will be the development path for the future of each community. There are three options suggested by the model:

1. A disaster may hit the community causing a rapid and significant decline and forcing them into a resilience development path seeking recovery back to the original stable condition. Resilience theory suggests that communities that have already experienced disasters are better prepared to respond to a new event than those that have not had such an experience in recent memory. As such, the impact would be less and their recovery might be quicker.
2. For most communities, there will not be a major disaster and they will only have the normal degradation of time to address, which is mostly done through physical and long range community community planning by local governments and individual entrepreneurs. This would be a sustainability development path that maintains the status quo.
3. The third option is for a community to incorporate the strengths of both resilience practices and sustainability practices to move them to a new level of community well-being and quality of life. For a community to be even better than they were in the past requires them to be both resilient (innovative and change oriented) and sustainable (maintaining sense of place and continuity). This is how we envision a successful sustainable and resilient community to be (see Lew et al., 2018). 

Sustainability and resilience are two powerful ways that communities manage their development. Unfortunately, they are often confused and used interchangeably in both common and professional discussions. While some people may disagree with our definitions of the terms here, in the end it does not matter what words we use. It is the intention and resources available to better the communities that we live in that are most important. Change is a constant, but so is identity. How these are managed so both is allowed to flourish is the goal of a sustainable and resilient people and place.

Resilience has nothing to do with good or bad. Resilience is about the ability of a system to achieve its goals. Goodness and badness are value judgments about those goals. They do not tell us about the resilience of the system.

The words above, or something very close to them, came out of my mouth when I was advising a student about a thesis he is writing related to resilience. There are many examples of social systems that most people would consider "bad", but which appear to demonstrate very strong resilience. This is especially obvious in politics. For example, I would guess that across the globe there are very few people who hold positive sentiments toward the political regime of North Korea. However, that regime has exhibited extraordinary resilience against efforts by many of the most economically and militarily powerful countries in the world to encourage it to change its ways. While less extreme, tensions between the political right and left in many countries shows how each demonstrates a degree of resilience when out of power that is often seen as frustrating to their opposition.

In the context of communities, the resilience of poverty, and related to that malnutrition and homelessness, demonstrates another system that many people would like to end, but which seems to be stubbornly resilient to effective change (Allison & Hobbs, 2004).. It is a self-organizing system, made up of numerous subsytems that benefit from a poverty regime and adapt with great flexibility to changing government policies and sociodemographic conditions.

To me, the presence of highly resilient, yet morally "bad", systems seems so obvious. To understand resilience, one must understand that it applies to both "good" systems and "bad" systems. I would guess that these are structurally the same, and that in many cases what is good to one person or group of people is bad to another. In addition, in many instances the resilience issue is one of how the "bad" system relates to the "good" system. This is seen in the case of left and right wing politics, cited above, but also in the case of natural hazard disasters and community resilience to deal with them. It is even hard to use the words "good" and "bad" here, as they are simply two systems occupying the same space.

Take for example, human settlements and major weather events, which appear to be increasingly in conflict with one another. Natural events (typhoons/hurricanes, as well as earthquakes and tsunamis) only become disasters when people are harmed by them. People are harmed by them when they settle in locations or build structures in ways that largely ignore the potential damage that may ensue. Climate change is the same. In both of these instances, there is a lack of understanding by the human system of the natural system, which then results in a human disaster. One cannot exist without the other.

Similarly, when we try to assess the resilience of a community's tourism system, we are not making judgments about how environmentally sustainable or socially conscious the system may be. Instead the focus should (in my opinion) be on the ability of the system to effectively navigate or manage the adaptive cycle in response to any perturbations that may arise. Environmental conservation and social equity are (again in my opinion) sustainable development issues, not resilience issues. (See: Sustainability Driven and Resilience Driven Societal Development.) And they can also be highly contentious political issues, where people disagree on what is good action and what is bad action -- and we can assess the resilience of each of those positions.

So, why is it that an online search on "the resilience of bad things" shows only articles and links about how to be resilient against bad things, including "when things go wrong", "bad times" and "strength in the face of adversity"? These results were mostly related to psychological resilience, and appeared on both Google and Google Scholar. The only thing that came close to the concepts that I am discussing here were two articles on the resilience of US Southern culture and on US Southern religion. I am not sure what to make of that!  When I changed the search to include the word "community", the results were somewhat more nuanced. There was still a strong emphasis on resilience to bad events, but there were also some critiques of the concept of resilience. Most of these suggest that resilience is poorly defined, and government resilience policies tend to support neoliberal and power elite agendas. (See, for example: What Resilience is Not: Uses and Abuses.)

Many of the proponents of the systems theory approach to community resilience have long claimed that it is non-normative (neither good or bad), and is primarily a descriptive science (Brand & Jax, 2007). I believe that this is true from a systems approach, which is what I am arguing here. When we describe the resilience of a system, and how it maintains (or loses) that resilience, then the normative issues of good and bad are mostly irrelevant. Resilience becomes normative when we try to make a system more resilient. In that instance, we immediately bring in values and, as a result, politics. (See, for example: What to Save? The Normative Dilemmas of Resilience.) This is what the critiques of resilience are focused on, which is a perfectly valid argument because so much of the discussion these days is on how to make communities more resilient, especially to climate change. I also admit there there are some value judgments made in selecting variables to assess the resilience of a system, but again, this is not necessarily a characteristic of resilience, but rather of the epistemological biases of the researcher.

The possibility of neoliberal tendencies in the application and practice of resilience is a topic that deserves attention from sociology of science perspective. Beyond that is the large gap in organizational resilience literature on the resilience of bad (or undesirable) systems, as well as the relationship of bad systems to good systems, however those adjectives might be defined. I think these same issues may apply to psychological resilience (Berkes & Ross, 2013). Most things in life are a balance between preferred and non-preferred options, which can be conceptualized from a variety of ways, including a resilience systems approach.

This story also shows the value of graduate students. Whether purposefully or not, they can force us to think more clearly about the conceptual frameworks and assumptions that we take toward our research. And I am sure that I am not the first person to express the ideas in this blog. However, it is clearly not a very common perspective, and I would suggest is a largely unseen phenomenon. Perhaps putting this out in my own words will help to move this important discussion further along. Comments are, of course, welcome. :)

Alan A. Lew
Dept of Geography, Planning & Recreation
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona, USA


References

​Allison, H.E. and Hobbs, R.J. (2004). Resilience, adaptive capacity, and the “Lock-in Trap” of the Western Australian agricultural region. Ecology and Society, 9(1):3. <https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/article.php/641>

Berkes, F. and Ross, H. (2013). Community Resilience:Toward an Integrated Approach, Society & Natural Resources, 26:1, 5-20, DOI:10.1080/08941920.2012.736605

Brand, F.S. and Jax, K. (2007). Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 23. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23 

a post by Alan A. Lew