How can we nurture transformative resilience?
The 2011 Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability resulted in the publication of three scientific background papers that each named one important cultural transformation. The first called for Reconnecting with the Biosphere arguing “it is time for a new social contract for global sustainability rooted in a shift of perception — from people and nature seen as separate parts to interdependent social-ecological systems” (Folke et al., 2011).
The second paper, The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship, encouraged humanity to adopt the planetary boundary framework to enable a complex systems perspective that is not myopically focused on climate change alone (Steffen et al., 2011).
The final paper, Tipping towards Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation, said that while our human capacity for innovation was partially responsible for the crises we are now facing, “it is time to use this capacity and introduce innovations that are sensitive to the fundamental bonds between social and ecological systems” (Westley et al., 2011).
Nurturing a healthy and mutually supportive relationship between social and ecological systems is primarily done at a local and regional scale. Global collaboration in the process of re-regionalization and re-localization based on biologically and ecologically inspired whole-systems design will enable the kind of transformative innovation that will create global sustainability based on locally adapted regenerative cultures and their circular regional ‘biodiversity economies’ (see Shiva, 2012: 143).
Transformative resilience at a global scale emerges from the scale-linking collaboration and interconnection of regional and local subsystems that have themselves high levels of transformative resilience. Efforts to nurture transformative resilience can learn from the scale-linking patterns of nature’s life support systems — for example, by taking into account the dynamics described by the adaptive cycle and panarchy. Here are some resilience lessons from natural systems that can help us:
- Nature’s pattern is modularity — interconnected, decentralized networks exhibiting redundancy at and across scales
- Diversity creates requisite variety and adaptive capacity
- Redundancy in the provision of vital resources and functions increases self-reliance
- and resilience in decentralized but globally connected collaborative networks
- The local, regional and global are scale-linked into symbiotic and mutually supportive relationships
- The primary source of energy is the sun (nature runs on current solar income)
- Resource and energy flows are predominantly local/regional and organized in circular and regenerative patterns
- Self-regulation and regeneration are based on information and resource exchanges within nested networks within networks
- Collaborative relationships that encourage diversity facilitate the sharing of abundance and maintain systemic health
Economic globalization has played a role in raising planetary awareness of the human family. Its effects confront us with our interdependence with each other and all of life as we face inevitable ecological limits. Caught up in the expansive movement of the globalization process — which started with colonialism and continued with economic globalization — we came to believe that bigger is always better, forever chasing efficiencies of scale.
I believe that regenerative human civilization will be structured as a globally collaborative network of diverse, regionally adapted, regenerative cultures drawing on different versions of a shared narrative of interbeing. Such a network will mimic nature’s scale-linking pattern of diversity, health and resilience. The Stockholm Environment Centre, in collaboration with researchers from four continents, has proposed a series of ‘policy- relevant principles’ that could enhance the resilience of ecosystems functions (Biggs et al., 2012). Their recommendations invite these questions:
Q: How can we maintain diversity and redundancy?
Q: How can we enable connectivity?
Q: How do we ensure that we pay attention to slow variables and feedbacks?
Q: How do we foster a widespread cultural understanding of socio- ecological systems as complex adaptive systems?
Q: How do we effectively encourage learning and experimentation?
Q: How do we broaden participation?
Q: How can we promote polycentric governance systems?
The salutogenic [health-generating] transformation of our global economy involves a re-patterning into a mosaic of vibrant regional and local economies with the means to meet basic needs in a decentralized way, trading predominately in those goods and services that cannot be provided locally. Peer-to-peer open knowledge-, skill- and information-exchange, along with the transfer of enabling technology, should be the focal point of global-local collaboration. Material and energy flows need to be predominantly at the local and regional scale.
This approach has multiple benefits, creating win-win-win solutions. Keeping material resource flows localized or regionalized, as far as possible, acts as a powerful ‘enabling constraint’ that i) reduces the energy and environmental cost of transporting resources, ii) stimulates innovation in regional circular bioeconomies adapted to local resource availability, iii) generates meaningful jobs in local living economies, iv) offers cultural opportunities to celebrate and express diversity in collaborative global unity, and v) nurtures a decentralized, networked pattern of organization that creates redundancy and resilience at and across scales. A single question, asked in the right moment and context, explored openly, can initiate a process of local and regional resilience building:
Q: How can we generate meaningful local/regional work by engaging in a gradual process of import substitution, nurturing our capacity to meet the needs of regional consumption as much as possible through regional production based on regionally regenerative resources?
In The Resilience Imperative, Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty (2012) show how energy sufficiency, local food systems, monetary reforms and low-cost financing, land reform and affordable housing, along with democratic ownership and nurturing sustainability, are all elements of the puzzle of creating a decentralized, cooperative, steady-state economy. As we will explore in Chapter 7, growth is not a problem in itself. It only becomes a problem if we don’t learn to shift from the juvenile phase of quantitative growth to a more mature phase of qualitative growth, as occurs in the maturation process of ecosystems. [This article is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
The steady-state economy approach is compatible with efforts to shift from quantitative growth (through accumulation and resource depletion) to qualitative growth (through qualitative transformation, regenerative resource use and leveraging the potential of synergies). Lewis and Conaty propose four mutually supportive strategic objectives that help to strengthen the resilience of communities: reclaiming the commons, reinventing democracy, creating a social solidarity economy, and “pricing as if people and planet mattered” (pp.21–32).
Their book is a valuable collection of tools for anybody who wants to begin building transformative resilience at the scale of their local community. It reviews many working examples showing how we can redesign our monetary and banking system, create affordable housing and energy sufficiency at the community scale, support the creation of local food systems, redirect the flow of finance to support vibrant local economies, strengthen cooperative business and cooperative ownership, and thereby accelerate the transition towards a resilient and regenerative culture.
In alignment with the narrative of interbeing, Lewis and Conaty refer to Desmond Tutu’s suggestion that “We are not made for self-sufficiency, but for interdependence, and we break the law of our own being at our peril” (pp.336–337) and suggest that, “if interdependence is the essence, resilience and cooperation are the cornerstones” (p.337). The table below offers Lewis and Conaty’s distilled advice on how to nurture resilience and cooperation.
Cooperation in community resilience-building improves systemic health as the basis for all regenerative cultures.
“This is the essence of the cultural shift we are struggling through in the early years of the 21st century, transitioning from cultural notions of independence and individualism to interdependence and mutualism, a reuniting of the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ as Martin Luther King prophesied. Perhaps a Declaration of Interdependence would concentrate our heads and hearts in ways that would crystallize the essence of the massive cultural shift we are in the midst of, and which we must organize and leverage in a big way if human kind is to survive with dignity.” — Michael Lewis & Pat Conaty (2012: 337)
The David Suzuki Foundation (1992) published such a declaration of interdependence for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Its final sentence reads: “[…] at this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity to interdependence”. Cooperation for community resilience and systemic health is a natural consequence of understanding our interdependence, our interbeing.
[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
