Restoring the resilience of New Zealand’s indigenous birds: a case study of adaptive governance in one of the strictest biosecurity regimes in the world

ABSTRACT

Resilience thinking and biosecurity management are both concerned with adaptively governing social-ecological systems to ensure the resilience of socially, culturally, economically and environmentally desirable basins of attraction. This article explores the productive similarities between resilience and biosecurity in the context of adaptive governance of a predator-prey social-ecological system. The article finds value in unpacking resilience’s attributes and adaptive cycles and applying them for biosecurity purposes to key variables within New Zealand’s indigenous bird and mammalian predator social-ecological system. The article considers that incorporating resilience thinking into biosecurity policy would support and enhance biosecurity management by explicitly securing life from a systems perspective, and recommends further comparative analyses be undertaken in this multi-disciplinary area.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptive governance
• resilience thinking
• biodiversity
• biosecurity
• New Zealand

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deidre Ann McDonald

Deidre Ann McDonald is PhD Researcher and Teaching Fellow at Massey University and an employee of the Ministry for Primary Industries (the New Zealand government’s key biosecurity agency). Her research interests include biosecurity, agricultural assemblages and social-ecological systems. This article was written by the author in her personal capacity, and it does not necessarily represent the views of New Zealand government biosecurity or conservation agencies.