Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
I use the term “identification” and not “collective identity,” in spite of how deep-
rooted this latter term is in social science, with the intention of highlighting that this
is a continuous process of symbolic construction that creates a sense and feeling of be-
longing. Clearly, for processes of identification to acquire consistency they must be
based on “objective conditions of existence” shared by a significant proportion of the
members of the collective. If groups of people fail to find their collective identity, then
they either become disorganized individual entities or they act in accordance with the
particular strategies and interests of outside agents rather than pursuing their own col-
lective development.
Given the crucial importance of a strong sense of belonging and identification as a
fundamental factor in the resilience of a human group, it is clear that that participa-
tion, beyond its specific effects, is able to increase and intensify the resilience of the
group and the ecosystem in which it resides. Following Carl Folke and Per Olsson,
among others (Olsson 2003; Olsson and Folke 2004; Olsson, Folke, and Hahn 2004),
the idea of resilience
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can be understood in a global, integral, and socioecological
sense. The original definition of “resilience” derives from engineering and refers to
the capacity of a structure (e.g., a bridge) to return to its initial shape after bearing a
load. Both its mechanical conceptualization (understood as a material's capacity to re-
turn to its original state after having been deformed) and its psychological concept
(which tends to focus on the resilience of the individual and to highlight the capacity
to overcome negative impacts) are only partial understandings of the idea of re-
silience, which do not exhaust the potentiality of the concept. Resilience can also be
understood as the capacity to take advantage of opportunities that emerge as a conse-
quence of traumatic changes or of favorable circumstances that appear under normal
conditions.
From these ideas flows the concept of socioecological resilience, which im-
plies that social vulnerability and/or strength affects ecological vulnerability and/or
strength, and vice versa. In their definition of social group resilience, Brenson-Lazan
and Sarmiento Diaz (2003) understand it as the ability to cope with internal or exter-
nal crises and not only resolve them effectively but also learn from them, gain strength
through them, and emerge transformed, both as individuals and as a group. Living sys-
tems not only resist sources of stress, they also learn and are capable of projecting into
the future creatively. The search for a wider definition of resilience reveals that it is a
property of systems. Individual resilience does not exist in a strict sense, although it is
an implicit potentiality in each individual; it can only be manifested in relation to the
ecological and social environment. It is not an essence but rather a characteristic that
requires complex relations in order to exist. From a systematic perspective, resilience
could be defined as the capacity of a social system subjected to some form of stress to
regenerate itself along the lines of its original forms or new forms, as a kind of creative
conservation.
Furthermore, the idea of crisis, which is always implicit in the concept of re-
silience, can be understood in a broader sense that expands it beyond its usual nega-
tive or catastrophic connotation. Rather than being seen as exceptional events, crises
should be thought of as permanent components of ecological and social systems; they
