Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

17 Resilience for Whom? The Problem Structuring Process of the Resilience Analysis by Hugo Herrera This article was originally published in Sustainability, 9(7), 2017. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9071196 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license ABSTRACT Resilience is a flexible concept open to many different interpretations. The openness of resilience implies that while talking about resilience, stakeholders risk talking past each other. The plurality of the interpretations has practical implications in the analysis and planning of resilience. This paper reflects on these implications that have so far not explicitly been addressed in the literature, by discussing the problem structuring process (PSP) of a modelling-based resilience analysis. The discussion is based on the analysis of food security resilience to climate change in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, jointly undertaken by the author, governmental authorities, small-scale farmers and academics of the national university. The aim of this discussion is to highlight the underestimated challenges and practical implications of the resilience concept ambiguity and potential avenues to address them. The contributions of the results presented in this paper are twofold. First, they show that, in practice, the resilience concept is constructed and subjective. Second, there remains a need for a participatory and contested framework for the PSP of resilience. Keywords: food security; resilience; power; system dynamics; problem structuring process 1. INTRODUCTION Climate change effects start to be recognised as threats to food system sustainability and food security [1]. Sustainability involves maintaining the functionality of the system without compromising its capacity to do so in the future [2]. However, undergoing effects of climate change compromises food system functionality by contributing to water scarcity and pest exacerbation [3]. Resilience is understood as the systemadaptive ability ofmaintaining its functionality evenwhen the system is being affected by a disturbance [4,5,6]. For this reason, resilience is a compelling framework for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand how socio-ecological systems (SESs) adapt and transform to withstand changes in the environment. In practice, resilience is often used as a measure of a SES’s capability to respond and adapt to new conditions (e.g., climate change). Like Tendall et al. [2] (p. 18) describe, “sustainability is the measure of system performance, whereas resilience can be seen as a means to achieve it”. Resilience has the potential to contribute to food security by enhancing farmers, and other stakeholders, capacity “for foreseeing and adapting to possible changes” [5] (p. 270). For instance, in the food systems literature, a number of studies have used resilience as framework for understanding how systems can adapt and transform in the presence of disturbances in the environment while still providing required amounts and quality of food [2,7]. Applications of resilience can be found in numerous disciplines, ranging from engineering to psychology to disaster risk management [8]. The increased popularity of resilience is due, at least partially, to the flexible meaning of the concept [8,9]. Resilience definitions have often been characterised as vague and unprecise in practical terms [2,9]. While the flexibility of resilience has moved it to the category of mainstream concepts and buzzwords, the same ambiguity represents a challenge to its application in prescriptive and normative settings. These challenges manifest when practitioners need to operationalise the concepts described in the literature to the context in which resilience will be applied. Unsurprisingly, different stakeholders of the analysed system have different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of what resilience means in practical terms. Since each stakeholder interprets resilience differently, the scope of the analysis to be undertaken is not a given but is constructed through a problem structuring process (PSP). The term PSP is used in this paper to describe the “process by which a presented set of conditions is translated into a set of problems, issues sufficiently well-defined to allow specific research action” [10]. During the PSP, stakeholders interpret the available information in light of their values and knowledge and negotiate what is the purpose and the boundaries of the study to commence (referred to from now on as the “scope of the resilience analysis”) [11,12]. The cognitive, social and political components, involved in the construction of the scope of analysis, condition its development and outcomes. The social and political nature of the PSP make it impossible to separate the conclusions and recommendations produced from the context in which they were produced. When talking about resilience, we cannot avoid the question: resilience for whom? Literature has recently started to recognise some of the practical challenges of resilience ambiguity [2,9,13]; however, it still lags behind on recognising the political implications of resilience ambiguity in the analysis and its outcomes [8,14]. While some progress has been made by operationalising the definition of resilience (see for example [2,13]), resilience frequently continues to be presented