Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function by Brian Walker and David Salt (review)

Forty years have passed since C.S. Holling wrote his seminal paper on ecological resilience (Holling 1973). Resilience in the Holling sense is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize, and to retain more or less the same function, structure, and feedbacks that the system had previous to disturbance (see more on www.resalliance.org). Some of us have been around long enough to witness how resilience science has developed from being a field of interest for a few natural and social scientists that sought to find better ways of managing natural resources. Lately resilience science has taken off at rocket speed. The concept has attracted interest from scholars of a diverse set of disciplines that recognize something highly explanatory in the resilience discourse.

It is with great interest I have read Brian Walker’s and David Salt’s recently published volume, Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function. Their first book, Resilience Thinking (2006), described the basic notions of resilience science. The new book discusses different ways that resilience thinking can be applied and be put into practice. In short, it describes how one can conduct a resilience assessment. It is for sure a worthwhile read, although some sections might be too technical for a non-academia reader due to the sheer number of new concepts dealt with.

The book is divided into 6 chapters, of which the first five ends with a case study. In the first chapter, Preparing for Practice, we learn that the activities undertaken when one is conducting a resilience assessment should follow three steps: “describing the system, assessing its resilience, and managing its resilience” (p. 1). The book begins by recommencing the essence of resilience thinking, portraying it as an emergent property of self-organizing systems, thresholds, linked domains, adaptive cycles, different scale interactions, specified and general resilience, adaptation, and transformation. As the authors conclude, these properties represent “all the stuff that is supposed to give you a handle on complex adaptive systems” (p. 22). The chapter ends by describing thresholds in rangeland systems.

Chapter 2, Describing the System, deals with how one goes about unfolding the system of management interest. A resilience assessment begins by bringing all the relevant stakeholders together. Walker and Silt recommend a number of useful steps that stakeholders can use to describe the system, such as a focus on scales and what drivers and trends are discernable. The chapter ends by describing the intriguing cases of the irrigation systems of the Acequia farmers in New Mexico, and what role the Bali water temples play in supplying a highly functional irrigation infrastructure to farmers. At a first glance, one could never have dreamed how intricate these management systems are; their assessment has taken scholars considerable effort and time to figure out and describe.

Chapter 3, Assessing Resilience, is the lengthiest chapter. It is divided into three subsections; dealing with specified resilience, general resilience, and transformability respectively. Specified resilience is “the resilience of some part of the system to particular kinds of disturbance” (p. 68), such as a habitat or a particular crop. When assessing specified resilience we should try to identify different types of thresholds. While a group of stakeholders can identify most thresholds in a system (the book describes a number of them), it is considerably more awkward to identify thresholds that define alternate regimes. Here Walker and Salt recommend involvement of specialists that can aid in developing explicit analytical models.

In the subsection Changing patterns in time and space, which I think is the most interesting part of the book, the authors states that it is possible to detect thresholds before they have been crossed. It is for sure hopeful. The authors describes several interesting “early warning signs” that one should be aware of, such as, that system variability and return time to equilibrium often increases...