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Diversity, Flexibility, and the Resilience Effect: Lessons from a Social-Ecological Case Study of Diversified Farming in the Northern Great Plains, USA

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dc.contributor.author Carlisle, Liz
dc.date.accessioned 2015-03-30T18:32:43Z
dc.date.available 2015-03-30T18:32:43Z
dc.date.issued 2014 en_US
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/10535/9674
dc.description.abstract "Social-ecological systems are considered resilient when they are capable of recovering from externally forced shocks. Thus, whether a given system is identified as resilient depends on a number of contested definitions: what constitutes a shock, what constitutes a discrete system, and what constitutes acceptable performance. Here, I present a case study in which outcomes apparent to both the researcher and the study subjects demonstrated resilience in effect: a group of farmers in the northern Great Plains in the north-central United States realized economically sufficient production during a low rainfall year when many others in the region did not. However, the researcher's attempt to model this case as a resilient system was continually challenged by qualitative findings, suggesting that these farmers did not experience the officially decreed 'drought' year as a shock. Moreover, the social and ecological processes that produced a 'resilience effect' functioned as open systems, and were not readily bounded, even in analytical terms. This is not to suggest that resilience is not an operationalizable concept. Rather, the series of processes which produce a resilience effect may be best understood within a broad framework attentive to diversity, flexibility, and relationships at multiple scales—instead of quantitative models focused on discrete moments of disturbance and adaptation." en_US
dc.language English en_US
dc.subject agriculture en_US
dc.subject drought en_US
dc.subject resilience en_US
dc.subject scale en_US
dc.subject social-ecological systems en_US
dc.subject sustainability en_US
dc.subject land tenure and use en_US
dc.title Diversity, Flexibility, and the Resilience Effect: Lessons from a Social-Ecological Case Study of Diversified Farming in the Northern Great Plains, USA en_US
dc.type Journal Article en_US
dc.type.published published en_US
dc.type.methodology Theory en_US
dc.coverage.region North America en_US
dc.coverage.country United States en_US
dc.subject.sector Agriculture en_US
dc.identifier.citationjournal Ecology and Society en_US
dc.identifier.citationvolume 19 en_US
dc.identifier.citationnumber 3 en_US
dc.identifier.citationmonth September en_US


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