Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

56 Apparently, the overall aim is to assess if the ecosystem is and remains within the regime of concern, which has been identified in the previous steps. Thus, step three specifies the variables and mechanisms that control the specific position of an ecosystem within state space. There are two options. The first option is to investigate empirically the value of the slow variables of a regime and plot it in a bifurcation diagram, as considered in Fig. 1. The amount of resilience is then measured as the distance between the current value of the slow variable and the critical value (Carpenter et al. 2001, Walker et al. 2002, Peterson et al. 2003, Bennett et al. 2005), which is termed precariousness (Walker et al. 2004). It may be possible to predict the position of an ecological threshold either by studying return time and standard deviations of a fast variable (Wissel 1984, Carpenter and Brock 2006) or by the repeated calculation of the Fisher information of a regime (Mayer et al. 2006). The second option of step three refers to the amount of resilience mechanisms inherent in the desirable regime. Resilience mechanisms include (a) critical functional groups and functional important species, such as top predators or keystone species (Folke et al. 2004, Bellwood et al. 2004, Micheli and Halpern 2005), (b) ecological redundancy and response diversity within functional groups (Walker 1995, Peterson et al. 1998, Elmqvist et al. 2003, Hooper et al. 2005, Nyström 2006); and (c) the existence of a matrix of support areas at the landscape scale that provide potential colonists to compensate for the loss of species at the local scale (Bengtsson et al. 2003, Hughes et al. 2005). The amount of resilience mechanisms may be a measure to assess the relative resilience of the desirable regime to the given disturbances (cf., Allen et al. 2005). The message of this section is that in a descriptive interpretation resilience can be a clearly specified and delimited stability concept. It is in this sense that resilience represents a quantitative and measurable concept that can be used for achieving progress in ecological science. RESILIENCE AS A BOUNDARY OBJECT In contrast to the use as a descriptive concept, resilience is increasingly viewed in a rather vague and malleable meaning. In the 1990s several scholars discovered the concept as an important tool to measure sustainability (Arrow et al. 1994, Perrings et al. 1995, Folke et al. 1996, Levin et al. 1998). Since then resilience has been used by various scientific disciplines, for instance economics (Farber 1995, Batabyal 1998, Perrings and Stern 2000, Brock et al. 2002, Perrings 2006), political science (Olsson et al. 2006), sociology (Adger 2000), or planning (Pickett et al. 2004), and each discipline has provided specific definitions (cf., Class 5–10 in Table 1). Moreover, resilience has been related to other scientific concepts such as carrying capacity (Seidl and Tisdell 1999), critical natural capital (Deutsch et al. 2003), strong sustainability (Arrow et al. 1995, Ott 2003, Ott and Döring 2004), globalization (Armitage and Johnson 2006), justice (Adger 2003), and adaptive co-management (Berkes et al. 2003, Olsson et al. 2004). In particular, resilience is increasingly interpreted in a broader meaning across disciplines as a way of thinking, a perspective or even paradigm for analyzing social-ecological systems (Folke et al. 2002, Folke 2003, Anderies et al. 2006, Folke 2006, Walker et al. 2006). Some authors expand theories or concepts drawn from ecological systems, e.g., alternative stable regimes, panarchy, or ecological redundancy, to examine social, political, and institutional systems (e.g., Gunderson and Holling 2002, Berkes et al. 2003, Allison and Hobbs 2004). Much research aims at a general theory for the resilience of whole social-ecological systems (cf., Class 8 in Table 1, Anderies et al. 2006). It is in this sense that resilience incorporates the capacity of social-ecological systems to cope with, adapt to, and shape change and learn to live with uncertainty and surprise (Folke 2003, 2006). Thus, we suggest that resilience has become a “boundary object.” Within the field of science and technology studies, this signifies a term that facilitates communication across disciplinary borders by creating shared vocabulary although the understanding of the parties would differ regarding the precise meaning of the term in question (Star and Griesemer 1989). Boundary objects are able to coordinate different groups without a consensus about their aims and interests. If they are both open to interpretation and valuable for various scientific disciplines or social groups, boundary objects can be highly useful as a communication tool in order to bridge scientific disciplines and the gap between science and policy (Eser 2002, Cash et al. 2003). Indeed, it is this vagueness and malleability, i.e., the potential variety of interpretations or applications of the term that makes boundary objects politically successful (Eser 2002). For example, the boundary object sustainability has been highly successful in providing the common ground for ecologists and economists, which were formerly thought contrary, to engage together for the needs of future generations. In addition, the concept has helped to reconcile contrasting interests of industrial and developing countries (UNEP 2002). But there is a fundamental drawback to this. Boundary objects can in fact be a hindrance to scientific progress. For example, themeaning of the term sustainability is highly diluted and unclear. The three-pillar conception of sustainability, i.e., development in economic, social, and ecological systems, has been reduced to a listing of any societal objectives that agents happen to think important. That means that the extension of the term has become extremely wide. This is due to the fact that the catchword sustainable development enables different scientific disciplines or social groups to justify their particular interest with respect to an accepted and ethically legitimated, societal goal (Ott 2003, Grunwald 2004b). It may thus even hide conflicts and power relations when different persons agree on the need for sustainability when in fact meaning different things by it. Therefore, sustainability is generally conceived as arbitrary or as an illusion and within sustainability science there is confusion on how to operationalize and apply the concept (Grunwald 2004a). To