Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

Resilient supply of ecosystem services

Key ecosystem properties Diversity and redundancy Connectivity Slow variables and feedbacks

Key attributes of the social system

Resilient social system, able to effectively navigate changing social-ecological conditions

Polycentricity Learning and experimentation

Participation Complex adaptive system understanding

Social-ecological system

Time

Figure 8.2 Co-evolution of social and ecological systems (Carson and Sommerkorn et al., 2016).

for learning, applying and revising knowledge. This applies particularly to knowledge regarding continued capacity of ecosystems to provide support for human life and well-being, and to knowledge about the likely ecosystems impacts of human activities. Both inform the choices communities make and actions they take at all scales. While agency is a property only of social systems – and a key ingredient for social or community-level resilience – knowledge and the capacity to continue learning and to apply that knowledge to informaction, links social and ecological systems through providing feedbacks that can inform agency. A third vital social factor also influences agency; the answer to the question of ‘resilience of what, to what’ is contingent on social values and power, and may therefore be contested (Tanner et al., 2015).The potential for contestation contributes to uncertainty, and to the systems process character of agency to play out along different paths. There will be multiple resiliences in any particular social-ecological system, and the strengthening of some may have the effect of weakening others. This is true also for ecosystems, where systems with different appearance (i.e. different sets of species and different distributions of functions) can be resilient in the same physical environment (Scheffer et al., 1993), for example, as cultural and natural landscapes. In this chapter, adaptation refers to actions taken to maintain system functions and feedbacks in roughly the same configuration as previously, so that stronger adaptive capacity is an expression of greater resilience. Transformation of a social- ecological system, on the other hand, entails fundamental change in some aspects of a social-ecological system while maintaining its core identity.The capacity to navigate this type of fundamental change is also enhanced by greater resilience. Fundamental change in which identity and function are lost is defined as collapse or failure. Adaptive and transformative capacity should therefore be understood as expressions of resilience (Folke et al., 2010).

nor do they necessarily result in progress (Dietz et al.,1990; Burns and Dietz, 1992; Dietz and Burns, 1992; Gual and Norgaard, 2008).What these and other studies clearly indicate is that while socio-cultural and biological evolution influence one another, they play out through very different processes andmechanisms. Figure 8.2 highlights the co-evolving relationship between nature and society, acknowledging the distinction between the two is an analytical one that takes account of the different mechanisms by which change unfolds iteratively over time. The definition of resilience employed in this chapter emphasizes human agency. Agency is exercised by people – in groups, organizations, or communities at different levels – making use of social and ecological systems-related knowledge as an explicit element of their adaptive and/or transformative capacity. The fact that societal actors have the capacity to choose how they respond to drivers of change – and to choose to themselves be drivers of change (Davidson, 2010) is an influential force in social-ecological systems and a fundamental difference between the two subsystems (this is not to say that there are not real limits on such choice, imposed by nature, or lack of needed resources or by socially constructed limits such as laws). This capacity to plan and carry out deliberate action is essential to efforts to define community or social resilience. It is a fundamental property of both the capacity to adapt and the sense of choice that empower a community to consciously engage in transformative change – whether in response to unwanted or unavoidable disturbances, or in pursuit of a more desirable set of arrangements (Davidson, 2010). Agency is of course not a stand-alone property; it is influenced by other factors that are also basic elements of social systems. A second key factor that distinguishes social-ecological resilience from ecological resilience is the human capacity 8.2.4 Social side of social-ecological resilience: agency, knowledge and power