Time for a radical rethink of resilience and development

MUTUAL INFLUENCE: It is becoming increasingly evident that development challenges such as food and water shortages are inextricably linked to emerging crises like pandemics, rising inequalities and climate change.

Despite this, most development interventions still pay too little attention to these interdependencies. Instead they tend to prioritise short-term economic goals. Ultimately, this undermines resilience and therefore fails to deliver development outcomes.

Redefining development

The four centre researchers behind a new paper in the journal Ambio, Jamila Haider, Maja Schlüter, Carl Folke and Belinda Reyers, show what it means to instead take a complex social-ecological systems approach to development.

Drawing on the large literature of coevolution drawn from many disciplines, the authors suggest development can be redefined as a co-evolutionary process of social and ecological interdependence. Coevolution is a theory that addresses how different entities or relationships mutually influence each other’s development.

The paper proposes three key ingredients of such an approach, and explores what they would imply for farmers in the Pamir Mountains, a region of high biocultural diversity in the poorest area of Central Asia and subject to many development interventions.

Proposition 1: “Social–ecological relationships co-evolve”
A coevolutionary approach enables social and environmental dynamics to be considered in relation to one another and in constant interplay.

For example, over 33 different apple varieties have evolved through social–ecological interactions in the Pamir Mountains. Losing one of these varieties may not seem like a big thing, but the interrelatedness of that seed to culture, spirituality and social organisation must also be considered in any development intervention.

Proposition 2: “Resilience is the capacity to filter practices”
Resilience can be conceptualized as the capacities to adapt to change or transform by filtering social-ecological relationships (i.e. to influence what is selected and retained).

For example, a woman growing her own landrace seeds (locally adapted and domesticated), is constantly selecting successful practices, thereby influencing the variation and retention of both agricultural crops and cultural practices. However, she may not have the same influence that a development organisation has to mold the filter so that her ideas and practices can survive, thereby the innovative potential for variation also disappears.

Proposition 3: “Development is a co-evolutionary process shaping pathways of persistence, adaptation or transformation”
Development outcomes affect social-ecological relationships which create opportunities for future interventions.

For example, an “improved” wheat seed variety was introduced twenty years ago to two communities. The first community abandoned their traditional seed varieties and now relies on food aid imports because the introduced variety failed after two years. The second community, on the other hand, maintained their traditional varieties and practices and had local wheat seeds to fall back on when the new variety failed.

Link to publication