Learning log 8 - resilience

Learning log 8

For this learning log I focused on two articles: (1) Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for

social–ecological systems analyses by Carl Folke, and (2) Organizing Smart Networks and Humans into

augmented Teams by Martijn Neef et. al. The firs one describes the concept of resilience while the second one presents a practical way and experiments on creating augmented team (interaction of humans systems with other, such as technological devices, to increase the efficiency and reach of a group). I will focus more on the first one, since it presented detailed explanations about resilience and adaptability concepts.

The main idea in the first article was to present that resilience is not about constancy, but about variability. That resilience is the capacity of a system to continue existing after a disturbance. But beside these basic ideas, what really called my attention is about finding “multi stable behavior”, the author said that to find it, you have to consider the relations between the analyzed system and the related ones through the lens of the speed in which they act. This speed issue in the system analysis determines how many information to collect (period of time). And by knowing from which point in time to start and where to stop, you can draw the boundaries of your analysis.

For example, to analyze changes in a society system, if our focus is on political organization, our boundaries could be set according to the duration of a government, or, if we are to analyze food production, we could use seasons or other weather related issue to help us setting an initial boundary. And then the boundary can be changed according to what we discover from a system and its relations. For example, if we are analyzing a social system according to the duration of a specific politician’s government, we may discover that the reasons or results of changes and adaption (to keep resilience) of this system have roots on previous governments, and so we may have to increase the boundary of our analysis, which could grow to, for example, the duration of some specific political ideology in power.

Another issue the author talks about is about how the actors of a system get adapted to new schemes and overcome disturbance, he states that an actor know what to change according to the feedbacks it gets from the other actors. And in order to be able to adapt, this actor must have the possibility to do so, therefore, there must not be a centralized controlling power, what takes us back to Elionor Ostrom speech in the Nobel Prize conference. I am referring back to this issue because I believe it is a very important issue that I will have to consider when doing my final report, where I want to analyze the current situation of the Millennium Villages in Mozambique through a systemic way, and see how the government influences in its future, what has to be changed and how the MV community can find a way to be resilient and sustainable while other systems may be action opposite to their goals.