Resilience Pivots: Stability and Identity in a Social-Ecological-Cultural System

Abstract

"How is cultural resilience achieved in the face of significant social and ecological change? Is resilience compatible with changed structures, functions, and feedbacks as long as identity is maintained? The concept of cultural resilience has been less explored than its older siblings ecological resilience, social resilience, and social-ecological resilience. We seek to redress the balance, drawing from resilience thinking to examine how a New Zealand Ma-ori tribal group of landowners retained strong cultural identity and connectedness to their land despite enduring significant changes in land use, economy, tenure, and governance. The landowners negotiated radical transformations in the ecology and land use of their home lands on terms that supported matters of cultural importance. The key resilience concepts of adaptation and transformation were helpful in analyzing the trajectory of change, but fell short of representing the elements of stability that supported the cultural resilience of the landowners. The concept of resilience pivots was designed to address this conceptual gap, and to offer another heuristic to resilience thinking by focusing on stability rather than change. Resilience pivots are those elements of a resilient system that remain stable despite adaptation or even transformation of other elements of that system, and in doing so support the maintenance of the system’s distinctive identity."