Latest Briefing

Sustainability and Resilience Demystified

 The terms sustainability and resilience occur frequently in science and policy documents and most people have an intuitive sense of what these terms mean in general when applied to agriculture, ecosystems, or rural livelihoods. In common with other terms that originate in science, and are subsequently used in wider spheres, such as in policy discussions or everyday life, the scientific meanings of sustainability and resilience have become augmented by a large, and often less well-defined, set of additional meanings and connotations. This accumulation of extra meanings and nuances is not necessarily a bad thing, but one of the results is that the everyday meanings of the terms contain ambiguities that lead to a reduction in their explanatory value. That is, the terms encompass so many possible interpretations that each use has to be qualified in order for it to be unambiguously understood. This makes their continued use as well-defined policy objectives ever more difficult. 

The solution to this problem is to strip back the meanings of sustainability and resilience to their technical definitions and create new (or adapt existing) terms to hold any additional meanings which are important to particular contexts. The justification for this approach is that, at root, all of the meanings of sustainability and resilience depend on the constancy of the central technical definitions to have any meaning at all. This briefing paper deals with the first part of this disambiguation process; i.e. stripping the terms sustainability and resilience back to their essential features.
 
In the remainder of this paper we will use the term “system” in a generic sense to refer to any interconnected set of objects and processes which has a definable existence as a whole. For example, bacteria, animals, people, farms, rural communities, and regional economies are all examples of systems.
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Published on 4 March 2010 in Sustainability

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