Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

45 Nestedness of social-ecological systems enables polycentric governance [35]. This allows management systems to be scaled appropriately for the problems they are aiming to solve, capitalizing on the advantages of a particular governance arrangement while simultaneously having institutional backup systems [36]. Polycentric governance among global actors is now emerging as a response to shocks and new cross-scale connections. For example, interactions among climate change, ocean acidification, and marine biodiversity are addressed by the Global Partnership on Climate, Fisheries and Aquaculture (PaCFA) initiative. PaCFA currently includes representatives from FAO, UNEP, WorldFish, The World Bank’s Profish Programme and 13 additional international organizations. The program involves deliberate attempts for mutual adjustments and self-organized action, with mechanisms ranging from information sharing to coordinated action and conflict resolution. PaCFA operates at the international level through the interplay of individuals, international organizations and their collaboration patterns [37]. Monitoring—the provision of transparent, relevant information about status and trends of the social-ecological system—is essential for building and maintaining resilience. Indicators of social processes and the ecosystem help users and managers understand status and trends of critical ecosystem services. Sometimes indicators may provide early warnings of approaching thresholds [38,39]. Leadership and trust confer resilience on social-ecological systems and social relations in general. Often a mere handful of key individuals (e.g. institutional entrepreneurs that manage the context, complex as it is), help shape management and governance trajectories, developing shared visions, building trust, connecting social networks across levels, and seizing windows of opportunity for social-ecological transformations towards adaptive governance that nurture general resilience [40,41]. Nonetheless, resilience can be undermined by social dilemmas such as the incentive to cheat on agreements. This tendency can be countered if trust is built up through repeated interactions among people [42]. This aspect of trust construction plays a role in self-organizing regulation of environmental commons [33]. Trust is a component of social capital that sometimes helps to overcome such social dilemmas [43,44]. 4. FOSTERING GENERAL RESILIENCE General resilience is the area of research currently receiving most attention from those involved in applying resilience in practice. Resilience assessments have tended to focus on aspects of the specified resilience of a particular region. The principles for enhancing resilience of individual social-ecological systems [1,5,45] are consistent with the types of enabling conditions for general resilience just described. For example, Biggs et al. [45] suggest seven principles for enhancing resilience, which address diversity, connectivity, feedbacks and slow variables, polycentric governance, learning and experimentation, breadth of participation, and the complex adaptive characteristics of social-ecological systems. In this section of the paper, we touch upon some general-resilience implications of recent studies in other literatures, including those on natural disasters, social vulnerability, scenario planning, and adaptive management. Some elements of general resilience are implicit in the literature of natural disasters. A recent report from the World Bank [46] focused on four policy needs for managing environmental disasters: (1) make information about environmental disaster risk more easily accessible; (2) use land and housing markets to induce people to locate in appropriate areas and take preventive measures; (3) provide adequate infrastructure and public services to reduce vulnerabilities; and (4) build institutions that permit public oversight of disaster preparedness and disaster response. These are important practical steps at the level of national governance. Consideration of general resilience reminds us that additional factors must be considered, such as polycentric governance to match scales of problems and solutions. After a disaster occurs, rapid response is crucial but it is also important to rebuild resilience, as detailed in a recent meeting of disaster experts [47]. Disturbance erodes capacity to organize and respond, and induces new feedbacks that tend to keep the system in the disturbed state. The longer a community stays in a disturbed state after a disaster the more difficult recovery becomes, and eventually it may not be able to recover at all. Yet quick-fix responses may lead to superficial outcomes that are harmful in the long run [48]. Thus response strategies for disasters must also consider rebuilding of resilience against possible future disturbances. The attributes that confer social-ecological resilience to shocks are often unrecognized, and they may be eroded or lost over time unless they are actively fostered and managed [49]. Increased awareness, learning and collaboration across sectors [50,51], improved education, mobilization of experience and social capital, leadership, and multi-scale governance are critical elements in reducing vulnerability and building resilience to shocks [2,50,52]. All of these factors affect social vulnerabilities. Failure to reduce social vulnerabilities can amplify risk more than the escalation of physical hazards does [46]. Scenario planning is a method of exploring the resilience of a social-ecological system to a wide range of factors. Scenarios are a coordinated set of stories that reveal sharply different alternative futures for a social-ecological system. The alternate scenarios within a set diverge as a result of human decisions, diverging drivers, and large-consequence events. The purpose of the set of scenarios is to evoke conversations about thresholds that separate different future pathways of a social-ecological system. The alternative pathways often have different implications for resilience to future shocks that are outside the scope of the scenarios. For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [51] described four different states of the world in 2050. Each state has different resilience to climate changes that are expected to unfold after 2050. In regional environmental assessment and planning, the scenario process has many similarities to adaptive ecosystem management [53], a pioneering form of resilience analysis.