A new article published in Ecology and Society explores how to engage with and operationalize complexity thinking in resilience assessments and resilience planning. According to lead author My Sellberg, the article built on discussions from the GRAID workshop in Johannesburg in 2017.
“In practice, complexity thinking is not always embedded in the way resilience thinking is applied, even though it is such an important fundament,” she explains.
“In the paper, we wanted to clarify and exemplify what operationalizing complexity can look like in resilience practice. We draw on examples and insights from 12 different cases of resilience assessments and resilience planning from across the world. To be more systematic and include different aspects of complexity, we used Rika Preiser and colleagues’ framework of 6 features of complex adaptive systems; contextual; open; relational; dynamic; adaptive; and emergent.”
“A key idea that came out of the analysis was that we can use these features almost as design principles to enable processes that allow for positive emerging outcomes, such as trust, relations, learning, shared understandings and collaborations. We also saw that we operationalize complexity both through tools and concepts to better understand and capture the complexity of a social-ecological system (“system complexity”), and through designing a participatory process that in itself is adaptive, enables relations and iterations, etc. (“process complexity”). Working with this process complexity is more of a tacit knowledge, something we have done often without being so explicit about it. The paper and appendices have a lot of examples of experiences and tools from other cases that we think can be a useful resource bank.”
View the full paper here.