An indicator framework for assessing livelihood resilience in the context of social–ecological dynamics

Livelihood resilience draws attention to the factors and processes that keep livelihoods functioning despite change and thus enriches the livelihood approach which puts people, their differential capabilities to cope with shocks and how to reduce poverty and improve adaptive capacity at the centre of analysis. However, the few studies addressing resilience from a livelihood perspective take different approaches and focus only on some dimensions of livelihoods. This paper presents a framework that can be used for a comprehensive empirical analysis of livelihood resilience. We use a concept of resilience that considers agency as well as structure. A review of both theoretical and empirical literature related to livelihoods and resilience served as the basis to integrate the perspectives. The paper identifies the attributes and indicators of the three dimensions of resilience, namely, buffer capacity, self-organisation and capacity for learning. The framework has not yet been systematically tested; however, potentials and limitations of the components of the framework are explored and discussed by drawing on empirical examples from literature on farming systems. Besides providing a basis for applying the resilience concept in livelihood-oriented research, the framework offers a way to communicate with practitioners on identifying and improving the factors that build resilience. It can thus serve as a tool for monitoring the effectiveness of policies and practices aimed at building livelihood resilience.     

Biophysical indicators and Indigenous and Local Knowledge reveal climatic and ecological shifts with implications for Arctic Char fisheries

Managing Arctic marine resources to be resilient to environmental changes requires knowledge of how climate change is affecting marine food webs and fisheries. Changes to fishery resources will have major implications for coastal Indigenous communities whose livelihoods, health, and cultures are strongly connected to fisheries. Understanding these broad social-ecological changes requires a transdisciplinary approach bringing together contrasting and complementary disciplines and ways of knowing. Here, we examine climatic proxies, ecological, and fishery indicators (stable isotopes, fish condition, and lipid content), and interviews with Inuit fishers to assess how marine ecosystem changes have influenced Arctic Char (Salvelinus alpinus) ecology and fisheries over a 30-year time period (1987–2016) in the Kitikmeot region of the Canadian Arctic. Inuit fishers reported several observations of environmental changes, including longer ice-free seasons, warmer ocean temperatures, and the arrival of new marine species. Biophysical data revealed important changes toward earlier dates of ice breakup (>12 days in some areas) and a shift in isotopic niche reflecting a changing Arctic Char diet, with increased contribution of pelagic carbon and higher trophic level prey. Fish condition was improved in years with earlier ice breakup, as observed by both Inuit fishers and biophysical indicators, while lipid content increased through time, suggesting that longer ice-free seasons may have a positive effect on Arctic Char quality as reflected by both fish condition and lipid content. Long-term impacts of continuing climate change, however, such as the northward expansion of boreal species and increasing ocean temperatures, could have negative effects on fisheries (e.g., physiological impairment in fish if temperatures exceed their thermal range). Continuous community-based monitoring that directly informs fisheries management could help communities and managers adaptively, and sustainably, manage in the face of multiple interacting changes in Arctic marine systems.     

Resilience compromised: Producing vulnerability to climate and market among quinoa producers in Southwestern Bolivia

Climate change is already affecting rural communities along the high Andean plateau, but it is just one of many stresses that Andean people experience on a regular basis. This paper examines the experiences of quinoa farmers in Southwestern Bolivia as they faced the overlapping crises of protracted drought and market disruption in 2017. Drawing on political ecologies of resilience, this paper argues that the ability of rural people to cope with this double exposure was already compromised by ecological and social vulnerabilities produced through the development trajectories of the previous two decades. These development strategies generated three overlapping processes: 1) neoliberal entanglements involving specialization in quinoa production, marketization, and individualization of livelihoods in ways that undermined collective action; 2) new relationships of debt that tied households to monetized response paths and undermined flexibility; and 3) the degradation of soils through extensification, overproduction, and industrialization of quinoa production. This paper argues that while climate and market disruptions are not to be dismissed, we must historicize the double exposure to also ask how resilience and vulnerability to such challenges are generated in the first place.     

Catching sea cucumber fever in coastal communities: Conceptualizing the impacts of shocks versus trends on social-ecological systems

Research on vulnerability and adaptation in social-ecological systems (SES) has largely centered on climate change and associated biophysical stressors. Key implications of this are twofold. First, there has been limited engagement with the impacts of social drivers of change on communities and linked SES. Second, the focus on climate effects often assumes slower drivers of change and fails to differentiate the implications of change occurring at different timescales. This has resulted in a body of SES scholarship that is under-theorized in terms of how communities experience and respond to fast versus slow change. Yet, social and economic processes at global scales increasingly emerge as ‘shocks’ for local systems, driving rapid and often surprising forms of change distinct from and yet interacting with the impacts of slow, ongoing ‘trends’. This research seeks to understand the nature and impacts of social shocks as opposed to or in concert with trends through the lens of a qualitative case study of a coastal community in Mexico, where demand from international seafood markets has spurred rapid development of a sea cucumber fishery. Specifically, we examined what different social-ecological changes are being experienced by the community, how the impacts of the sea cucumber fishery are distinct from and interacting with slower ongoing trends and how these processes are affecting system vulnerability, adaptations and adaptive capacity. We begin by proposing a novel framework for conceptualizing impacts on social systems, as comprised of structures, functions, and feedbacks. Our results illustrate how the rapid-onset of this fishery has driven dramatic changes in the community. New challenges such as the ‘gold-rush-style’ arrival of new actors, money, and livelihoods, the rapid over-exploitation of fish stocks, and increases in poaching and armed violence have emerged, exacerbating pressures from ongoing trends in immigration, overfishing and tourism development. We argue that there is a need to better understand and differentiate the social and ecological implications of shocks, which present novel challenges for the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of communities and the sustainability of marine ecosystems.     

Climate change vulnerability and social development for remote indigenous communities of South Australia

There is a strong contemporary research and policy focus on climate change risk to communities, places and systems. While the need to understand how climate change will impact on society is valid, the challenge for many vulnerable communities, especially some of the most marginalised, such as remote indigenous communities of north-west South Australia, need to be couched in the context of both immediate risks to livelihoods and long-term challenges of sustainable development. An integrated review of climate change vulnerability for the Alinytjara Wilurara Natural Resources Management region, with a focus on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, suggests that targeted analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation options can overlook broader needs both for people and the environment. Climate change will add to a range of complex challenges for indigenous communities, especially in relation to hazards, such as fire and floods, and local environmental management issues, especially in association with invasive species. To respond to future socio-ecological risk, some targeted responses will need to focus on climate change impacts, but there also needs to be a better understanding of what risk is already apparent within socio-ecosystems and how climate interacts with such systems. Other environmental, social and economic risks may need to be prioritised, or at least strongly integrated into climate change vulnerability assessments. As the capacity to learn how to adapt to risk is developed, the value attributed to traditional ecological knowledge and local indigenous natural resource management must increase, both to provide opportunities for strong local engagement with the adaptation response and to provide broader social development opportunities.     

A three-tiered approach to participatory vulnerability assessment in the Solomon Islands

Greater recognition of the seriousness of global environmental change has led to an increase in research that assesses the vulnerability of households, communities and regions to changing environmental or economic conditions. So far, however, there has been relatively little attention given to how assessments can be conducted in ways that help build capacity for local communities to understand and find their own solutions to their problems. This paper reports on an approach that was designed and used to work with a local grass roots organization in the Solomon Islands to promote inclusivity and participation in decision-making and to build the capacity of the organization to reduce the vulnerability of communities to drivers of change. The process involved working collaboratively with the organization and training its members to conduct vulnerability assessments with communities using participatory and deliberative methods. To make best use of the learning opportunities provided by the research process, specific periods for formal reflection were incorporated for the three key stakeholders involved: the primary researchers; research assistants; and community members. Overall, the approach: (1) promoted learning about the current situation in Kahua and encouraged deeper analysis of problems; (2) built capacity for communities to manage the challenges they were facing; and (3) fostered local ownership and responsibility for problems and set precedents for future participation in decision-making. While the local organization and the communities it serves still face significant challenges, the research approach set the scene for greater local participation and effort to maintain and enhance livelihoods and wellbeing. The outcomes highlight the need for greater emphasis on embedding participatory approaches in vulnerability assessments for communities to benefit fully from the process.     

Globalization,Pacific Islands,and the paradox of resilience

On April 2nd, 2007 a 12 m tsunami struck Simbo, a relatively remote island in Western Province, Solomon Islands. Although Simbo's population continues to depend on their own food production and small-scale governance regimes regulate access to resources, the island's way of life over the last century has increasingly been affected by processes associated with globalization. In this context of a rapidly globalizing world, this article examines the island's resilience and vulnerability to the tsunami and the adaptive capacities that enabled the response and recovery. The tsunami completely destroyed two villages and damaged fringing coral reefs, but casualties were low and social–ecological rebound relatively brisk. By combining social science methods (household surveys, focus group and ethnographic interviews) and underwater reef surveys we identify a number of countervailing challenges and opportunities presented by globalization that both nurture and suppress the island's resilience to high amplitude, low-frequency disturbances like tsunamis. Analysis suggests that certain adaptive capacities that sustain general system resilience come at the cost of more vulnerability to low-probability hazards. We discuss how communities undergoing increasingly complex processes of change must negotiate these kinds of trade-offs as they manage resilience at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Understanding the shifting dynamics of resilience may be critical for Pacific Island communities who seek to leverage globalization in their favor as they adapt to current social–ecological change and prepare for future large-scale ecological disturbances.     

A bridge too far? The influence of socio-cultural values on the adaptation responses of smallholders to a devastating pest outbreak in cocoa

The influence of socio-cultural factors on the adaptive capacity, resilience and trade-offs in decision-making of households and communities is receiving growing scholarly attention. In many partly transformed societies, where the market economy is not well developed, livelihood practices are heavily structured by kinship and indigenous social and economic values. Farm investment decisions and incentives to produce agricultural commodities are shaped by a host of considerations in addition to market imperatives like profit. In one such partly transformed society in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, we examine the adaptation decisions of smallholders in response to the drastic drop of yield in their cocoa plots caused by the sudden outbreak of Cocoa Pod Borer. To explain why the impact of the pest has been so great we examine the interconnections between household responses, the local socio-cultural and economic context of smallholder commodity crop production and the wider institutional environment in which household choices and decisions are made. We argue that the significant lifestyle changes and labour intensive farming methods required for the effective control of Cocoa Pod Borer are incompatible with existing smallholder farming systems, values and livelihoods. To adopt a high input cropping system requires more than a technical fix and some training; it also requires abandoning a ‘way of life’ that provides status, identity and a moral order, and which is therefore highly resistant to change. The paper highlights the enduring influence and significance of local, culturally-specific beliefs and socio-economic values and their influence on how individuals and communities make adaptation decisions.     

Vulnerability to climate change in the Arctic: A case study from Arctic Bay,Canada

This paper develops a vulnerability-based approach to characterize the human implications of climate change in Arctic Bay, Canada. It focuses on community vulnerabilities associated with resource harvesting and the processes through which people adapt to them in the context of livelihood assets, constraints, and outside influences. Inuit in Arctic Bay have demonstrated significant adaptability in the face of changing climate-related exposures. This adaptability is facilitated by traditional Inuit knowledge, strong social networks, flexibility in seasonal hunting cycles, some modern technologies, and economic support. Changing Inuit livelihoods, however, have undermined certain aspects of adaptive capacity, and have resulted in emerging vulnerabilities in certain sections of the community.     

Vulnerability of Himalayan transhumant communities to climate change

Climate change vulnerability depends on who you are, where you are and what you do. The indigenous communities who primarily depend on natural resources for subsistence livelihoods are among the first and most affected by climate change. Climate models have predicted pronounced warming in high altitude regions of the Himalayas. The transhumant communities of the Himalayas follow traditional lifestyles based on seasonal livestock rearing and subsistence agriculture. There is however, no information on how vulnerable transhumant communities are to climate change, and how vulnerability of transhumant herders differs across the mountainous areas of Nepal. Based on semi-structured interviews with transhumant herders and using the IPCC climate change vulnerability framework, this study assessed and compared the vulnerability of transhumant communities from three districts representing Eastern, Central and Western mountainous region of Nepal. The results showed that the livelihood vulnerability and the climate change vulnerability differ across sites; both of them having lowest index values in the Central region. The vulnerability dimensions viz. exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity are largely influenced by diversity in livelihood strategies, income sources and crops, and access to food, water and health facilities. The findings will inform the design of policies and programmes to reduce vulnerability and enhance adaptive capacity of indigenous communities in general and the transhumant communities of the Himalayas in particular.     

Resilient livelihoods in an era of global transformation

Much as development’s understanding of livelihoods became intertwined with notions of sustainability in the late 1990s, today livelihoods analysis is taking up the rise of resilience in the development and climate change adaptation communities of practice. The emergent concept of resilient livelihoods risks perpetuating problematic framings of both socio-ecological and livelihoods dynamics that limit the effectiveness of development and adaptation interventions. In this paper, I connect recent contributions to the livelihoods and socio-ecological resilience literatures to define resilient livelihoods as projects aimed at the achievement of well-being in a manner that preserves existing systems of meaning, order, and privilege. These projects (re)produce socio-ecologies, deeply human assemblages of socio-cultural and biotic elements. So framed, the idea of resilient livelihoods centers meaning, power, difference, and agency in both livelihoods and socio-ecological dynamics. It opens up new understandings of the character, sources, and importance of resilience in livelihoods, allows for the identification of new indicators of livelihoods fragility, points to previously-overlooked sources of potential livelihoods transformation and change, and suggests sites of productive engagement between development and adaptation interventions and transformation and change.     

An assessment of climate change impacts and adaptation for the Torres Strait Islands, Australia

Adaptive practices are taking place in a range of sectors and regions in Australia in response to existing climate impacts, and in anticipation of future unavoidable impacts. For a rich economy such as Australia’s, the majority of human systems have considerable adaptive capacity. However, the impacts on human systems at the intra-nation level are not homogenous due to their differing levels of exposure, sensitivity and capacity to adapt to climate change. Despite past resilience to changing climates, many Indigenous communities located in remote areas are currently identified as highly vulnerable to climate impacts due to their high level of exposure and sensitivity, but low capacity to adapt. In particular, communities located on low-lying islands have particular vulnerability to sea level rise and increasingly intense storm surges caused by more extreme weather. Several Torres Strait Island community leaders have been increasingly concerned about these issues, and the ongoing risks to these communities’ health and well-being posed by direct and indirect climate impacts. A government agency is beginning to develop short-term and long-term adaptation plans for the region. This work, however, is being developed without adequate scientific assessment of likely ‘climate changed futures.’ This is because the role that anthropogenic climate change has played, or will play, on extreme weather events for this region is not currently clear. This paper draws together regional climate data to enable a more accurate assessment of the islands’ exposure to climate impacts. Understanding the level of exposure and uncertainty around specific impacts is vital to gauge the nature of these islands’ vulnerability, in so doing, to inform decisions about how best to develop anticipatory adaptation strategies over various time horizons, and to address islanders’ concerns about the likely resilience and viability of their communities in the longer term.     

Wildfire preparedness,community cohesion and social–ecological systems

The consequences of wildfires are felt in susceptible communities around the globe on an annual basis. Climate change predictions in places like the south-east of Australia and western United States suggest that wildfires may become more frequent and more intense with global climate change. Compounding this issue is progressive urban development at the peri-urban fringe (wildland–urban interface), where continued infrastructure development and demographic changes are likely to expose more people and property to this potentially disastrous natural hazard. Preparing well in advance of the wildfire season is seen as a fundamental behaviour that can both reduce community wildfire vulnerability and increase hazard resilience – it is an important element of adaptive capacity that allows people to coexist with the hazardous environment in which they live. We use household interviews and surveys to build and test a substantive model that illustrates how social cohesion influences the decision to prepare for wildfire. We demonstrate that social cohesion, particularly community characteristics like ‘sense of community’ and ‘collective problem solving’, are community-based resources that support both the adoption of mechanical preparations, and the development of cognitive abilities and capacities that reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience to wildfire. We use the results of this work to highlight opportunities to transfer techniques and approaches from natural hazards research to climate change adaptation research to explore how the impacts attributed to the social components of social–ecological systems can be mitigated more effectively.     

Panarchy of an indigenous agroecosystem in the globalized market: The quinoa production in the Bolivian Altiplano

Agricultural globalization is blamed for destructive impacts on small farms in developing countries. Yet, many local societies are proactive in the face of these changes and show high adaptive capacity. Investigating their transformations with an integrative perspective and enough hindsight may reveal some of the bases of their resilience and adaptive capacity. Using field data and the panarchy concept of resilience theory, we analyzed the territorial and social dynamics of quinoa growers’ communities in southern Bolivia over the last four decades, a case study of regime shift in a poverty-stricken rural society which deliberately entered the global food market. Linking the dynamics of the household economy to the territorial and social subsystems over several decades, we gained insights into the interactions that shaped the rise of quinoa production in the region. We found that a vivid tradition of mobility allowing for pluriactivity on- and off-farm, combined with community self-governance, explains how local populations succeeded in articulating individual agency with collective control over their commons of land, seed resources, and social rules. Our vulnerability analysis points to landscape homogenization, social inequity, and increased dependence on external factors as potential sources of unsustainability. We conclude that, to cope with the changes of unprecedented magnitude they are facing, local producers should retain social cohesion and autonomous governance, without giving up on their heritage of mobility and economic redundancy. As regards theory, we identified cross-scale subsystem configurations critical for regime shifts, and confirm the value of panarchy in capturing complex socioecological dynamics.     

Adapting to changes in volcanic behaviour: Formal and informal interactions for enhanced risk management at Tungurahua Volcano,Ecuador

This paper provides an example of how communities can adapt to extreme forms of environmental change and uncertainty over the longer term. We analyse the interactions between scientists, communities and risk managers and examine the interpretation and communication of uncertain scientific information during a long-lived volcanic eruption in Tungurahua, Ecuador. This is complemented with a detailed study of the eruptions of 2006 and 2014, which exemplifies the complexity of interactions during periods of heightened volcanic activity. Our study describes how a ‘shadow network’ has developed outside of, but in interaction with, the formal risk management institutions in Ecuador, improving decision-making in response to heightened volcanic activity.The findings suggest that the interactions have facilitated important adaptations in the scientific advisory response during eruptions (near-real-time interpretation of the volcanic hazards), in hazard communication, and in the evacuation processes. Improved communication between stakeholders and the establishment of thresholds for evacuations have created an effective voluntary evacuation system unique to Tungurahua, allowing people to continue to maintain their livelihoods during heightened volcanic activity and associated periods of uncertainty. Understanding how shadow networks act to minimise the negative consequences of volcanic activity provides valuable insights for increasing societal resilience to other types of hazards.     

Testing resilience thinking in a poverty context: Experience from the Niger River basin

Resilience thinking is an important addition to the range of frameworks and approaches that can be used to understand and manage complex social–ecological systems like small-scale fisheries. However, it is yet to lead to better environmental or development outcomes for fisheries stakeholders in terms of food security, improved livelihoods and ecological sustainability. This paper takes an empirical approach by focusing on the fundamentals of resilience thinking to evaluate its usefulness in developing relevant management interventions in small-scale fisheries in the Niger River Basin in West Africa. The paper presents the outputs of a participatory assessment exercise where both fishery communities and local experts were involved at two different scales. The resilience frame used was designed to facilitate the identification of socially defined thresholds that help delineate the desirability of the current system configuration and provides a diagnosis framework that tailors management solutions to problems in local context. The analysis highlights some key contributions from resilience thinking to the challenge of diagnosis in small-scale fisheries management in developing countries, as well as important contributions that emerge from taking a pragmatic and critical approach to its application.     

The Arctic Council: an agent of change?

The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among Arctic States, Indigenous communities and peoples on issues of common importance. The rising geo-political importance of the Arctic and the onset of climate change has resulted in the Council becoming a focus of increasing interest from both inside and beyond the Arctic. This has resulted in new demands placed on the Council, attracted an increasing number of participants and instigated a period of transformation as Arctic states work to find a way to balance conflicting demands for improving the effectiveness of the Council and taking care of national interests. This paper considers if during this time of change the Council is having an impact upon the issues it was formed to address i.e. environmental protection and sustainable development. To provide answers it looks at how the Council operates and through the lens of biodiversity identifies drivers and barriers to the Councils institutional effectiveness; providing an understanding of the norms and rules which constitute the Council and which are central its problem-solving abilities. It is clear that the Council is changing and how it operates is evolving in response to the increasing attention paid to all things Arctic. However, challenges to ensuring effective outcomes from its activities remain and without clear strategies many of the Councils efforts can appear ad-hoc and without due recourse to forward planning. However, when clear and detailed plans are in place to guide the work of the Council as for biodiversity then glimpses can be seen of its potential to act as an agent of change.     

Opening space for equity and justice in resilience: A subjective approach to household resilience assessment

While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing resilience remains an outstanding problem. To date, measurement has largely relied on the identification of proxy indicators, inevitably shaping what is measured in ways that reflect underlying assumptions, generalisations and approximations, and raising the question of whose values are being embedded into resilience. These concerns reflect recent interest in the role of recognition justice in resilience, and in particular how marginalisation from meaning-making processes creates the conditions for the inequitable distribution of outcomes in practice. Here, we propose a two stage, subjective approach to resilience assessment, starting with rapid household interviews that invite participants to assess the likely impact of multiple shock and stressor storylines. In a second step, participatory qualitative methods are employed to support inductive investigation of resilience focused on the factors that differentiate those reporting relatively high and low resilience. We illustrate this using fieldwork data from 569 households in Bangladesh. This subjective approach enables households to engage in the production of knowledge about their resilience, revealing two core features of situated heterogeneity: the forms of difference, and the underlying causes. Underlying causes arise from interactions and feedbacks between social, political, economic and institutional conditions that are highly context specific, while significant forms of difference include intra-community and scalar heterogeneity; vulnerability to specific or generalised shocks; and the role of undesirable practices in securing resilience. The results underline the need for resilience to be assessed in relation to local understandings of precarity, and through the expression of senses of justice that inform local conceptions of wellbeing. This means moving beyond positivist approaches and placing epistemic diversity at the centre of resilience assessment, enabling the production of a situated understanding of how and why resilience is differentiated, and offering an analytical starting point from which policy and practice can drive towards equitable resilience.     

Vulnerability

This paper reviews research traditions of vulnerability to environmental change and the challenges for present vulnerability research in integrating with the domains of resilience and adaptation. Vulnerability is the state of susceptibility to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the absence of capacity to adapt. Antecedent traditions include theories of vulnerability as entitlement failure and theories of hazard. Each of these areas has contributed to present formulations of vulnerability to environmental change as a characteristic of social-ecological systems linked to resilience. Research on vulnerability to the impacts of climate change spans all the antecedent and successor traditions. The challenges for vulnerability research are to develop robust and credible measures, to incorporate diverse methods that include perceptions of risk and vulnerability, and to incorporate governance research on the mechanisms that mediate vulnerability and promote adaptive action and resilience. These challenges are common to the domains of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience and form common ground for consilience and integration.     

Multi-level participation for building adaptive capacity: Formal agency-community interactions in northern Kenya

Multi-level, networked participation is a vital component in building social–ecological resilience and the capacity to adapt to environmental change. This paper outlines the ways in which multi-level participation contributes to adaptive capacity and, in so doing, takes a step toward articulating a theory of participation based on resilience thinking. We use a case study of Gabra pastoralist communities of northern Kenya to illustrate how multi-level participation may lead to increasing adaptive capacity, above and beyond existing pastoralist adaptations. The findings suggest that adaptive capacity is systemic—that is to say, it is a property of the social–ecological system, including especially the network of institutional linkages that characterizes that system, as much as it is a property of particular actors within the system. We argue that there are three key elements of meaningful multi-level participation: an institutional environment in which the various levels of institutions are linked, inclusivity in decision-making at these various levels, and deliberation. These three features can work together to create meaningful multi-level participation, to facilitate the co-production of knowledge and to build adaptive capacity.