7 - Social–Ecological Resilience and Its Relation to the Social Pillar of Sustainable Development

Summary

Sustainable development is a value-based goal for reconciling interconnected social, environmental, and economic systems in a manner that preserves options for future generations.¹ Similar to sustainable development, resilience captures the integrated nature of society and the environment on which it relies. However, beyond the similarity in the systems they apply to, the terms are of a different nature. Resilience (as defined in the line of literature beginning with the work of ecologist Dr. C. S. (Buzz) Holling² and relied on in this chapter)³ is an emergent property of complex social–ecological systems as the result of their internal and cross-scale interactions and feedbacks, and their responses to disturbance. Human views of social systems are essentially normative with goals such as equity, fairness, justice, and sustainability. As a result, the tendency in scholarly writing related to resilience and social systems is to use “resilience” as a normative term, which in turn leads to the concern that resilience scholarship fails to adequately address social and more specifically, environmental justice.