Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

46 Adaptive management is always embedded in institutions and governance systems. Extreme events call for governance systems that provide incentives for resilience building and are themselves resilient to such events [54]. Adaptive governance systems with polycentric arrangements and bridging organizations connecting scales enable adaptivemanagement [45,55]. For general resilience such attributes should not be subject to planning and control in a narrowly prescribed way [33], but instead supported by enabling legislation and economic incentives that allow for self-regulation and innovation. Critical features of wellfunctioning adaptive governance systems for social-ecological resilience include the role of key actors, bridging organizations, flexible institutions, and social networks that serve to connect the dynamic responses and strategies [56,57]. 5. CONCLUSION General resilience has a valuable role in managing rare extreme events with large consequences for social ecological systems. Of necessity, the guidelines for general resilience are rather non-specific. Nonetheless, in applications of general resilience it is essential to tailor policies and practices to the particular characteristics (governance, social interactions, ecosystem processes, etc.) of the social- ecological system that is being managed. In some cases, actions to build resilience against specific extreme events also contribute to general resilience. The greatest challenge of general resilience is to design and implement concrete policies and actions. Unless incentives are constructed properly, short-term decision making will tend away from the long-term view that is needed to build and maintain general resilience. How can long-term practices be woven into actions that also meet the immediate needs of people and ecosystems? This is the crucial challenge of general resilience, a challenge that faces many real limits of costs and political barriers. General resilience is a public good that has a cost. How much resilience is needed, in what dimensions, and at what cost? Policies for general resilience must overcome budget limitations, address trade-offs, be acceptable to competing interests, and overcome barriers in politics and the structure of existing agencies and institutions. It may well be the case that costs are too great to justify more investment in general resilience. Such practical limitations may be the greatest barrier to policies for general resilience. Research and practice have built some insight about how to build general resilience. Nonetheless, much research is needed to understand practices for general resilience in diverse situations. For example, how general is general resilience? Are certain characteristics of social- ecological systems (Table 1) more or less effective for building general resilience? Are some characteristics particularly well suited to building resilience for certain classes of social-ecological problems? So far there are only a few case studies that reveal long-run effectiveness of strategies for general resilience. Further research on general resilience is a high priority, in view of the rapid rates of change and emergence of new interactions and feedback in social-ecological systems.