Resilience, globalisation and sustainable livelihoods

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Resilience, globalisation and sustainable
livelihoods
Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystem Health
Informing Policy, Practice and
Research University of Guelph - June 4-7, 2006

• Derek Armitage
• Wilfrid Laurier University

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Questions for consideration

• Does resilience thinking provide a useful lens
  for understanding livelihoods?
• Limitations
• Points of conflict
• Points of compatibility
• Can resilience thinking contribute to SL policy
  and practice?

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Resilience in brief

• Key features
• Amount of disturbance a system can absorb and
  remain in same state
• Ability of system to self-organize
• Capacity to learn from and adapt to change

source www.sustainablefutures.net
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Resilience in brief

• Larger, slower variables stabilize smaller,
  faster variables through a memory effect
• Long-standing institutions (e.g., common property
  rights)

• Smaller and faster variables may disrupt
  stability and slower, larger variables,
  precipitating revolt
• Individual preferences, pest outbreaks

• Implications for livelihoods?
• Focus on key variables (fast and slow)
• Thresholds

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Globalisation in brief

• Globalisation a summary device for very complex
  phenomenon
• Drivers of globalisation
• Capitalism
• Modernity

• Outcomes of globalisation
• Rapidity of change
• Loss of local control
• Increasing uncertainty, risk, insecurity and
  vulnerability
• Outcomes of globalisation are neither uniform nor
  socially neutral
• Some benefit, others do not

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Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

• Slow variables
• Property rights
• Community norms, collective choice
• Intact, mature mangrove ecosystems

• Livelihood implications
• Increased dependency on narrower resource base
• Increased marginalization and decreased
  livelihood stability
• Decrease of ecological regenerative capacity
• Resource-based conflict

• Fast variables
• Ideological and value change (privatisation)
• Desire for foreign exchange
• Ethnic change (and associated value shift
• Desire for domestic protein
• Loss of mangrove system and new pressure points
  (capture fisheries)

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Resilient livelihoods in a globalising world?

• Pace and intensity of globalisation-induced
  change
• Fast variables acting on slow
• Globalisation a challenge for resilience thinking
  (i.e., what slow moving variables??)
• How, where should we locate resilience?
• Difficulty inherent in defining thresholds

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Resilient livelihoods in a globalising world?

• Resilience as a dialectic and the importance of
  scale
• Locating resilience is a normative process
• Livelihoods and need for cross-scale governance