Things Change, We Change: Planning for Community Resilience in the Canadian ArcticKathleen Parewick

Department of Geography, Memorial University, St. John’s, NLpaerewyck@hotmail.com

When We Change

A central theme in Resilience Alliance research is that conventional management concepts must be revisited keeping the inherently unpredictable nature of adaptive systems in mind. Addressing community challenges – be they economic, environmental, social, or health-related – at the local level has long been a job for community members active or employed in local government, community services, law enforcement, and a host of related non-governmental organizations. Community planning and development work comprise a suite of institutionalized practices that have evolved in support of their efforts to keep pace with the continual adaptation needed to sustain their communities.

This project recognizes that these established mechanisms for managing change processes represent both a body of accumulated experience to be mined as well as key community functions that must be thoughtfully explored by those seeking to understand and support community adaptation.

Planning for Resilience

Working collaboratively with several coastal Arctic communities, this project examines local planning and development functions in detail to determine how they might better serve to build community resilience and support local climate change adaptation. Up-to-date geophysical scientific findings, indigenous knowledge and existing governance mechanisms will be integrated using an open, community-guided planning process facilitated by the researcher and informed by participatory action methodology and principles derived from resilience theory. Engaging community members in timely knowledge-sharing, discussion, analysis and planning respecting their ongoing adaptation is an immediate objective of this project, with the longer-term goal being the fostering of social learning and institutional “memory” in support of a more sustainable community future.

The Adaptive CycleA stylized Mobius strip tracing ecosystem phases of exploitation (or growth), conservation, release (“creative destruction” or collapse) and reorganization. Resilience is the third dimension missing in this image: it expands and contracts with the various system phases to alternately emphasize conservative and creative adaptive strategies.

Resilience

“The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, undergo change and still retain essentially the same function,

structure, identity, and feedbacks.”

Source: Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org)

The Resilient Community

“A resilient community is one that takes intentional action to enhance the personal and collective capacity of

its citizens and institutions to respond to and influence the course of social and economic change.

…resilience is not a fixed quality within communities. Rather, it is a quality that can be developed

and strengthened over time.”

Source: The Community Resilience Manual, 2000

The Ladder of Citizen Participation

Planning and community development practice may be conceived of as an exercise of social cooperation wherein no single stakeholder has penultimate insight or absolute control. The common goal of fostering a strong community presumably brings everyone to a table where stock is taken, differences are aired and alternative scenarios weighed. Power-sharing - a degree of participation often described by practitioners with reference to Sherry Arnstein’s ladder - is to be strived for .

Conventional Municipal Plan Characteristics(after Hodge, 1998)

Resilience Assessment Characteristics(after The Community Resilience Manual, 2000)

Core features:Focused on physical environment and infrastructureLong-range and forward-looking (10-20 years)Takes a comprehensive view of community circumstancesEstablishes general, broad-based development policy and guidance

Generally also includes:Ties to social and economic objectivesDetailed planning analysesStaged implementationCapital improvements guideCommunity design guidelines

Standard contents: statistical profile and projections; descriptions of existing conditions and anticipated development; development goals and objectives; binding policy statements regarding various classes of development (i.e. residential, commercial, transportation,publicinstitutions…). Detailed implementation usually administered through companion development regulations or by-laws.

Core Features:Focused on people, organizations and capacity-buildingForward-looking but reflecting on past experienceTakes a multi-function, sustainable system approachOffers broad-based perspective on community processes

Outcomes emphasizing:Strategic allocation of internal resourcesLeveraging of outside resourceStrengthened local ownershipCitizen involvement in decision-making and implementationIntegrated social and economic goals

Community mobilization and collaboration as a means toprogress

Standard contents: community “portrait” incorporating qualitative information concerning local attitudes, organizationand communication and an inventory of keystone resilience factors; statements of community issues, goals and resilience-building priorities; best practice summaries; and consensus-based local action plan.

Comparison of Community Planning and Resilience Approaches

Panarchial Connections

As postulated by Gunderson and Holling (2002), there are two nested system connections which are fundamental to adaptive capacity. The “revolt” connection can cause changes in one social-ecological cycle to destabilize a larger and slower one. The “remember”connection aids renewal by drawing down the accumulated knowledge residing in a larger, slower cycle. Envisioning the community in these panarchic terms, local governance institutions reside at an intermediate level between shorter cycles of individual, familial and operational knowledge and adaptation, and those larger ones of the indigenous worldview and a host of external factors.

Ground ice profile,Tuktoyaktuk ice house wall

Shoreline floodplain, Tuktoyaktuk

ReferencesBerkes, Colding and Folke (2003). Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building

Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press.Centre for Community Enterprise (2000). The Community Resilience Manual: A Resource

for Rural Recovery and Renewal. CCE-distributed on-line via www.cedworks.comHodge (1998). Planning Canadian Communities: An Introduction to the Principles,

Practice and Participants (Third Edition). Methuen.Holling (1986). The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: local surprise and global change.

In Sustainable Development of the Biosphere (Clark and Munn, eds.), Cambridge University Press.

Gunderson and Holling, eds. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press.

Leduc (in press). Inuit Economic Adaptations for a Changing Global Climate. Paper presentation at Canadian Society of Ecological Economics Conference, October 2005.

Resilience Alliance website - www.resalliance.org

Rapid erosion at Angus Lake (to left), west of Sachs Harbour. Note recently realigned ATV trail and proximity of Sachs River (right) .

Source: Berkes et al., 2003, adapted from Gunderson and Holling (2002)

Source: Arnstein, 1969 in Hodge, 1986

When Things Change

How do human communities cope with change and uncertainty? What distinguishes the community that bounces back from hard knocks and the one that comes apart at the seams? Is there a formula for community resilience?

These questions are being addressed by a number of disciplines. A community development worker will have one perspective. Community health staff have another. Disaster management practitioners are increasingly pursuing these themes as they look beyond crises to recovery and mitigation. And every community will have its own ideas too.

Complex Adaptive Systems

For some time, scientists in such diverse fields as ecology and economics have been studying complex systems in order to better understand and model the world around us. Reductionistthinking has failed to capture the multiple networks of repeated interactions that characterize relationships between individual agents and environments. Feedback loops, cascading effects and symbiotic behaviours count amongst the expressions of complexity arising from evolving, intertwined systems. Early study of transformational processes in ecosystems (C.S.Holling,1986) has been built upon in recent years by a multidisciplinary group of collaborators known as the Resilience Alliance.

Human communities are complex adaptive systems: every one exhibiting its own composite of dynamic traits and social-ecological linkages on a number of scales. Interpreting Holling’srepresentation of the adaptive cycle, a window of opportunity occurs during the uncertain backloop of a system’s response to disturbance which favours novelty and experimentation. Just such a window has opened in the Canadian Arctic in responseto increasingly apparent climate change. Communities thereare pursuing practical local solutions to problems occasioned by rising sea levels, decreasing sea ice extent and duration, increased wave action, declining water levels in rivers and lakes, permafrost melting, and unpredictable weather.

General Sustainability ModelCommunity planning is cyclical function. It is a vehicle for regularly revisiting collective circumstances in a public spherein order to guide development-related decision-making. The general sustainability model argues for management approaches that emphasize learning and the enhancement of system resilience. This project proposes a series of community-guided, researcher-facilitated case studies towards the development of a “learning” model of planning that will better account for factors the community sees as contributing to its resilience.

AcknowledgementsPartners in this project to date include the communities of Sachs Harbour and Tuktoyaktuk, the Municipal and Community Affairs Department of the Government of the Northwest Territories, Natural Resources Canada, the Aurora Research Institute, the Centre for Community Enterprise, ArcticNet, the Northern Science Training Program, the Climate Change Impacts and Adaptations Program, and a host of wonderful individuals already too numerous to list here.

Panarchy“A nested set of adaptive

cycles at different scales, that exhibits cross-scale

interactions”Source: Resilience Alliance

© Parewick, 2005

© Parewick, 2005

© Parewick, 2005

Condemned shoreline housing, Sachs Harbour

Presented at the ArcticNet Annual Science MeetingBanff, Alberta, December 2005

© Parewick, 2005

Source: Gunderson and Holling, 2002Source: Berkes et al., 2003, after Holling, 1986

“We really don’t believe scientists anymore because they never report anything. Why don’t they give information to us and

why don’t they want to know from us?”Louie Autut, Chesterfield Inlet

Source: Leduc (in press)

© Parewick, 2005North Spit, Tuktoyaktuk