Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

38 working with groups who are interested in using a resilience approach suggests that they tend to focus on specified resilience, and in doing so they may be narrowing options for dealing with novel shocks and even increasing the likelihood of new kinds of instability. Recognizing that efforts to foster specified resilience will not necessarily avoid a regime shift is a first step to understanding the need for transformational change. Getting beyond the state of denial, particularly in SESs with strong identity or cultural beliefs, is not easy and often requires a shock or at least a perceived crisis. Resilience thinking suggests that such events may open up opportunities for reevaluating the current situation, trigger social mobilization, recombine sources of experience and knowledge for learning, and spark novelty and innovation. It may lead to new kinds of adaptability or possibly to transformational change. MULTISCALE RESILIENCE AND TRANSFORMABILITY As defined in Walker et al. (2004), transformational change involves a change in the nature of the stability landscape, introducing new defining state variables and losing others, as when a household adopts a new direction in making a living or when a region moves from an agrarian to a resource-extraction economy. It can be a deliberate process, initiated by the people involved, or it can be forced on them by changing environmental or socioeconomic conditions. Whether transformation is deliberate or forced depends on the level of transformability in the SES concerned. The attributes of transformability have much in common with those of general resilience, including high levels of all forms of capital, diversity in landscapes and seascapes and of institutions, actor groups, and networks, learning platforms, collective action, and support from higher scales in the governance structure. Transformational change often involves shifts in perception and meaning, social network configurations, patterns of interactions among actors including leadership and political and power relations, and associated organizational and institutional arrangements (e.g. Folke et al. 2009, Huitema and Meijerink 2009, Smith and Stirling 2010). Deliberate transformational change can be initiated at multiple scales, and perhaps gradually, as suggested by recent experience with applying resilience thinking to catchment planning and management in SE Australia (Walker et al. 2009). Deliberate transformational change at the scale of the whole catchment, of all the component parts at the same time, is likely to be too costly, undesirable or socially unacceptable. Transformational changes at lower scales, in a sequential way, can lead to feedback effects at the catchment scale, which is a learning process, and facilitate eventual catchment-scale transformational change. Actors and organizations that bridge the local to higher social–ecological scales are often involved in such processes (Olsson et al. 2004). Forced transformation, however, is likely to occur at scales larger than the scale of the management focus and therefore be beyond the influence of local actors. Changes in regional tax structures, for example, may precipitate transformations from farming to suburbanization. Loss of summer sea ice may transform the geopolitical and economic feedbacks among Arctic nations. Systems with high transformative capacity may deliberately initiate transformational changes that shape the outcomes of forced transformations occurring at larger scales. Transformation trajectories are the subject of a growing literature (Gunderson and Holling 2002, Buchanan et al. 2005, Geels and Kemp 2006, Chapin et al. 2010), A resilience perspective emphasizes an adaptive approach, facilitating different transformative experiments at small scales and allowing cross-learning and new initiatives to emerge, constrained only by avoiding trajectories that the SES does not wish to follow, especially those with known or suspected thresholds. The first part of this process is much the same as that proposed in the socio-technical transitions literature, which encourages arenas for safe experimentation (e.g. Loorbach 2007, Fischer- Kowalski and Rotmans 2009). However, where the transition model then determines the new goal and adopts a particular process for reaching it, a resilience approach would allow the new identity of the SES to emerge through interactions within and across scales. For example, declining agricultural productivity in several Latin American countries due to land degradation reached an unsustainable level in the 1970s. This breakdown prompted some farmers to start experimenting with unconventional methods for land management, in particular low-till alternatives to plowing that enhanced soil organic matter and fertility (Derpsch and Friedrich 2009). Responses to the land productivity crisis and subsequent social crisis of deteriorated livelihoods were first pursued by individual farmers and researchers in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. Experimentation with new innovative breakthroughs in technologies were necessary, as the shift from then-dominant methods to no-tillage required major changes in land management practices, such as weed management, mulch-farming and green manuring techniques, as well as new machines for direct planting. The experimental learning approach at small scales, with processes for emergence and cross-scale learning, caused a transformation of the whole farming system. Currently, more than 25 million ha of agricultural land is under no-tillage in Brazil alone, and in Latin America the transition from conventional plow-based agriculture to no-till systems has reached a scale where one can talk of an agrarian revolution or a social–ecological transformation (Fowler and Rockström 2001). Case studies of SESs suggest that transformations consist of three phases: being prepared for or even preparing the social–ecological systems for change, navigating the transition by making use of a crisis as a window of opportunity for change, and building resilience of the new social–ecological regime (Olsson et al. 2004, Chapin et al. 2010). Such transformations are never scale-independent, but draw on social–ecological sources of resilience across scales (Gunderson and Holling 2002). For example, at the Great Barrier Reef a governance transformation across multiple levels of natural resource management took place from protection of selected individual