Between Resilience and Adaptation: A Historical Framework for Understanding Stability and Transformation of Societies to Shocks and Stress

How environmental stress affected past societies is an area of increasing relevance for contemporary planning and policy concerns. The paper below examines a series of case studies that demonstrate that short-term strategies that sustain a state or a specific bundle of vested interests did not necessarily promote longer-term societal resilience and often increased structural pressures leading to systemic crisis. Some societies or states possessed sufficient structural flexibility to overcome very serious short-term challenges without further exacerbating existing inequalities. But even where efforts were made consciously to assist the entire community the outcome often generated unpredictable changes with negative longer-term impacts. Greater degrees of baseline socio-economic inequality at the outset of a crisis are associated with less resilience in the system as a whole, a more uneven distribution of the resilience burden, and an increased risk of post-solution breakdown of a given social order. The historical case studies therefore indicate that future policy planners must consider structural socio-economic imbalances when designing and implementing responses to environmental challenges.