Dear Jhoanna,
Resilience is essential for sustainability. Sustainability means functionality in the long-term, so that if the system under study is not resilient (able to cope with changes/stressors and continue being functional), it will not be sustainable.
Maybe papers on agricultural sustainability that you can find on my profile can be helpful.
Regarding James' statement (very interesting by the way), I think that a bottom-up approach from resilience to sustainability should be followed.
Regards,
Alfredo J. Escribano.
Data Comparative Sustainability Assessment of Extensive Beef Catt...
The theme of sustainability is very refined. Resilience is a natural property, is the motor of the evolution, and is a feature of the long-terms phenomenons... more than sustainability, is a perdurability or duration adjective.
The life and the earth's glaciation, or the plants in hard winter are examples for resilience... the human specie is another example (weather and earth changes...); now, in social contexts we speak about resilience similar to adaptability...
Thanks,
José A.
Jhoanna,
There are a number of articles that try to get at the relationship between resilience and sustainability. A few include Barrett and Constas (2013) Toward a theory of resilience for international development, Coulborne (2008) Sustainable development and resilience, Coulthard (2011) Can we be both resilient and well? and Derrison et al. (2011) The relationship between resilience and sustainability of ecological-economic systems. A system can be resilient for some period of time without being sustainable in the sense that we tend to mean it (consider, for example, oppressive political regimes that might persist for decades--thus demonstrating resilience--whilst undermining the kinds of things we mean when we speak of sustainability). Part of this is to do with things like spatial subsidies, where the resilience of a particular system might be something to do with its ability to sequester or parasitize resources for other systems, thus masking its un-sustainability (until it is too late). These caveats aside, I think the answer to your question is certainly 'yes' in that the sustainability of a real-world system (that faces disturbances and changing system conditions) depends a great deal on its capacity for absorbing those changes, responding to them and learning, and self-organizing following them. This answer is not especially interesting, though, since the details of this (sustainability of what, resilience of what, to what?) all make a great deal of difference.
Colleagues and I have published a couple papers (attached) that deal with resilience in social-ecological systems-- not trying to self-promote gratuitously, but you may find some helpful leads in these. If you are interested, I would suggest the most recent two, on the Power Problematic in resilience (Ingalls and Stedman 2016) and, maybe less directly, Missing the forest for the trees (Ingalls and Dwyer 2016), which looks at climate change trade-offs through resilience as an analytic lens. Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Micah
Article Missing the forest for the trees? Navigating the trade-offs ...
Article The power problematic: Exploring the uncertain terrains of p...
Jhoanna,
There are a number of articles that try to get at the relationship between resilience and sustainability. A few include Barrett and Constas (2013) Toward a theory of resilience for international development, Coulborne (2008) Sustainable development and resilience, Coulthard (2011) Can we be both resilient and well? and Derrison et al. (2011) The relationship between resilience and sustainability of ecological-economic systems. A system can be resilient for some period of time without being sustainable in the sense that we tend to mean it (consider, for example, oppressive political regimes that might persist for decades--thus demonstrating resilience--whilst undermining the kinds of things we mean when we speak of sustainability). Part of this is to do with things like spatial subsidies, where the resilience of a particular system might be something to do with its ability to sequester or parasitize resources for other systems, thus masking its un-sustainability (until it is too late). These caveats aside, I think the answer to your question is certainly 'yes' in that the sustainability of a real-world system (that faces disturbances and changing system conditions) depends a great deal on its capacity for absorbing those changes, responding to them and learning, and self-organizing following them. This answer is not especially interesting, though, since the details of this (sustainability of what, resilience of what, to what?) all make a great deal of difference.
Colleagues and I have published a couple papers (attached) that deal with resilience in social-ecological systems-- not trying to self-promote gratuitously, but you may find some helpful leads in these. If you are interested, I would suggest the most recent two, on the Power Problematic in resilience (Ingalls and Stedman 2016) and, maybe less directly, Missing the forest for the trees (Ingalls and Dwyer 2016), which looks at climate change trade-offs through resilience as an analytic lens. Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Micah
Article Missing the forest for the trees? Navigating the trade-offs ...
Article The power problematic: Exploring the uncertain terrains of p...
Dear Jhoanna
To add to these interesting responses, I and colleagues have been studying approaches to resilience and sustainability in the urban context, and addressing gaps in the resilience literature in relation to issues of environmental and social equity. We have just published a paper analysing this through the adaptive governance lens and suggesting how that framework could be strengthened by engaging with institutional theory. Our approach seems to complement that of Micah and colleagues.
regards,
Paula
Article Blending adaptive governance and institutional theory to exp...
The evolution and concepts of sustainability and resilience in supply chains are studied in the recent paper,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325263295_On_sustainability_resilience_and_the_sustainable-resilient_supply_networks
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