Desirable States: The Politics of Resilience Thinking

Resilience thinking analyzes the structure and function of a social-ecological system to inform “adaptive management” on how to avoid a “regime shift” into a new and potentially “undesirable state.” The focus of resilience approaches on how much shock a coupled social-ecological system can absorb and still remain within a desirable or undesirable state begs many questions about what that state is, why it is so desirable, and for whom. A social-ecological system is considered to be in a desirable state based on its ability to provide ecosystem goods and services for societal development. Studies so far have not considered whose needs are being met from these goods and services and the politics of their distribution. Our political ecological approach advances resilience thinking by showing how “development” is contested by competing resource users whose vision of a “desirable state” differs from one another.  We consider power relations, particularly those surrounding access to and control of resources, as a key component of evaluating “regime shifts” and “desirable states.” Through a case study of industrial prawn farming in Tanzania, the social-ecological system can be considered in a “desirable state” for northern consumers, transnational corporations and the Tanzanian state who benefit from prawn capital, but not for local villagers whose rights to benefit from resources are diminished by industrial prawn production. Ecological data collected at the prawn production site predicts a looming collapse into a degraded ecological state. By drawing attention to the political economy of resource use and management, we show that reorganization through technological innovation to mitigate negative ecological impacts is not sufficient because it fails to also consider the social equity dimensions of sustainable development. The likelihood of revolt by local resource users against inequities inherent in the social-ecological system will also move the system into a new state. These inequities are occurring despite Tanzanian political regulations and global certifications for social and ecological “sustainability” in industrial prawn farming.  We address the seemingly “apolitical” resilience-based analytical approaches that assume “all things are equal” by presenting a revised adaptive cycle model that considers the fast and slow moving variables in the social realm to be as important as the ecological variables in determining “regime shifts” and defining “desirable states.”