Thinking the African Food Crisis - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 786

of“complexadaptivesystems”(Adger,Lorenzoni,andO'Brien2009).Itsfunctionisto
incorporate social and economic systems in an overarching complex science of “socio-
ecologicalresilience”rootedincivilsociety(thecommunityloomsverylargehere).he
scopeandscale(andinstitutionalization)ofresiliencythinkingisnowvast,encompass-
ingmostieldsofexpertisethataddresssecurityinthebroadestsense(fromtheIMFto
HomelandSecurity).HereareexcerptsfromtworeportsonfoodsecurityinAfricaand
the Sahel:
Resilience can be thought of as the opposite of vulnerability. Resilient food systems
can withstand political, economic, social and environmental shocks. Resilience
makes individuals, households and communities less vulnerable. . . it helps them
withstandmultiplestresses—occurringwithvaryingfrequency,predictabilityand
intensity—andbreakfreeofpersistentpovertyandacceleratehumandevelopment.
(UNDP2012,99)
Both analytically and pragmatically, resilience is becoming a more useful focus
than vulnerability. Vulnerability refers to the inability of people to avoid, cope with
orrecoverfromtheharmfulimpactsofhazardsthatdisrupttheirlivesandthatare
beyond their immediate control. Vulnerability is a deficit concept. . . . Resilience, on
the other hand . . . requires enabling people to discover how their livelihood/food
access system might be made more resilient to shocks, and how to renew or reor-
ganizetheirsystem,shouldsuchshocksoccur.hisrequiresdevelopinganunder-
standing of where resilience resides in the system, and when and how it can be lost
or gained, which means identifying the points in the household food system where
interventionscanincreasetheresiliencetofuturehazards.
(Gubbels2011,144)
Resiliencyisnowavastacademicandpolicyindustry—amongpolicymakers,activists,
consultants,andthedonorcommunity—thatencompassesvastswathsofthesocial,
economic,andpoliticallandscape(Davidson2010;Adger2006).Localknowledgeand
practice,notionsofvulnerabilityandexposure—inotherwords,thecriticalresponses
totheneo-MalthusianapproachtoSahelianproblemsofthe1970s—havebeengrated
onto a new turbocharged systems theory, derived in particular from the work of the
ecologist C. S. Holling and his associates, who have been brought together in a highly
inluential think tank called the Stockholm Resilience Center (Holling 1986, 2001).
Saheliancommunitiescannowbeine-tuned—paradoxicallybuildingontheirtradi-
tionalstrengths(e.g.,thesocialcapitalofvillagecommunities)yetsupplementedbythe
expertise of development and state practitioners.
Holling extended his view of resiliency by suggesting that all living systems evolved
through disequilibrium, that instability was the source of creativity. Crisis tendencies
werethusconstitutiveofcomplexadaptivesystems.Indeed,resiliencyisnowsocen-
tral to the notion of environmentally sustainable development—the cornerstone of
themajormultilateraldevelopmentandinternationalenvironmentalNGOs—thatthe
complexadaptivesystemsframework(includingthesortsofmeasuresofstandardiza-
tionandaccountingforassessingecosystemresilience)hasbeentakenupbythelikes