Resilience

The Resilience Alliance defines resilience as “the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future. Humans are part of the natural world. We depend on ecological systems for our survival and we continuously impact the ecosystems in which we live from the local to global scale. Resilience is a property of these linked social-ecological systems (SES).

"Resilience" as applied to ecosystems, or to integrated systems of people and the natural environment, has three defining characteristics:

• The amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on

function and structure

• The degree to which the system is capable of self-organization

• The ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation.”

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a temporary frame or framing element used for support in the creation, repair or recreation of complex processes, structures and systems. Our use draws on the usages found in construction, chemistry, engineering, design and ecology. Scaffolding helps align things that happen fast with those that are slow so that everything could come up together, in the right sequence at the right time.

See Chapter 4: Assembling Complexity of Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly for more on the role of scaffolding in emergent systems.

Panarchy

Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.

The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has led to the term panarchy. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable. Such changes comprise economic, ecological, and social systems, and they are evolutionary. They concern rapidly unfolding processes and slowly changing ones; gradual change and episodic change; and they take place and interact at many scales from local to global.

Our take on panarchy is closely adapted from the Resilience Alliance.