Over at The Interpreter, Sam Roggeveen picks up on Alex’s post on Doha to wonder whether a concern for resilience automatically leads to protectionism:
On one level, it makes sense. If the aim of resilience is to build the capability for society to ‘take a punch’ and rebound, whether from a terrorist attack, natural disaster or even a global economic calamity that restricts food imports, it makes sense to have the capacity for local subsistence.
But following that logic to its end would justify continued and even expanded protection of any industry that can be defined as ‘strategic’. Or at a further extreme, it would put you in the company of the survivalist subculture that stockpiles food in the mountains in preparation for the crumbling of civilisation.
I doubt Alex is in favour of such things, but I’d be interested to know how his resilience doctrine escapes that logic.
Let me chip in with two points. First, I really don’t like the ‘bounce back-ability’ definition of resilience (though it’s a term I often slip into using). The aim is to navigate from one ‘solution’ another, not to stick firmly to where you are.
As Alex and I put it in a forthcoming article for Renewal:
In formal terms, resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.” (Walker et al 2004). Perhaps the best practical definition we’ve come across is the one offered by the Harvard Business Review. It states that resilience results from being able to face up to reality, improvise in the face of unfamiliar challenges, while finding a source of ‘meaning’ that encourages long-term thinking (Coutu 2002).
Both definitions emphasize the need to change while maintaining a coherent identity. Systems that are brittle, that try to remain static at all costs, are precisely the ones that are most vulnerable to collapse. On the other hand, systems that are flexible, adaptable, that deal with crisis through renewal are the ones that will tend to survive. This is, in other words, a classic collective action problem. The central determinant of a system’s resilience is the ability to act collectively, coherently, and with the right balance between short and long-term interests.
In a high resilience system, risk – and response to that risk – is distributed throughout the system. Individuals and their groups see their interests as compatible with the collective. They have a common understanding of the challenges a society faces and take decisions accordingly, but this understanding is not a straitjacket. Different actors play to the strengths. There is a balance between initiative and co-ordination. In a low resilience system, on the other hand, risks are felt disproportionately by some groups and responses are thus over-centralized. Individuals pursue narrow self-interest; conflict between groups intensifies; and key institutions are increasingly seen as failing to ‘deliver’.
And from this comes my second point. Resilience of what? My starting point would be that the only way of providing any kind of decent life to 6, 7, 8 or 9 billion people is through an interdependent global system. That means building resilience into the international system, and then nesting it into all systems that sit below.
For me, that should rule out protectionism – though not attempts to hedge against a breakdown at the international level. But of course, it won’t. And that’s a problem. Indeed, collapse has been persuasively described by Joseph Tainter as a loss of complexity and retreat into constituent parts.
The process of collapse…is a matter of a substantial decline in an established level of complexity. A society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, less differentiated and heterogeneous, and characterized by fewer specialized parts; it displays less social differentiation; and it is able to exercise control over the behaviour of its members.
It is able at the same time to command smaller surpluses, to offer fewer benefits and inducements to membership; and it is less capable of providing subsistence and defensive security for a regional population. It may decompose to some of the constituent building blocks…out of which it was created.
