Beyond resilience and systems theory: reclaiming justice in sustainability discourse

Poverty is not only an evil in itself, but sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes. (WCED 1987, 8)

One of the standout features of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in early 2016 as part of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is the prominence of distinctly social objectives (see Lockie 2016). Goals 1–5 target an end to poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education and gender equality. Goal 10 aims to reduce inequality within and between nations. Goal 16 addresses peace, justice and the institutional infrastructure required to deliver them. Several of the more overtly environmental and economic goals are qualified with social objectives. Energy, for example, should be accessible and affordable. Economic growth should be shared. Work should be productive and rewarding. Cities should be safe and inclusive. Collectively, moreover, the SDGs are seen as integrated, indivisible and universal. No-one is to be left behind.

The spirit of Our Common Future

In principle, there is nothing particularly novel about the 2030 Agenda’s assertions about the indivisibility of social, economic and environmental goals. If there was anything radical about the idea of sustainable development as articulated by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in its 1987 report, Our Common Future, there is nothing radical about it now. Sustainability was mainstreamed long ago. Arguments over what really is and isn’t sustainable reflect how deeply the basic proposition has become embedded in our collective common sense. Of course, we ought to meet the needs of people today for food, shelter, meaningful work, self-expression, etc., without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. Of course, we ought to reconcile economic development and poverty alleviation with resource conservation and ecosystem protection.

In a sense, the problem here is the very success of the idea. Sustainability certainly demands a lot of us. It requires an approach to the future based on learning, deliberation and, most importantly, multiple accountabilities (Lockie 2012). But mainstreaming has still come at a cost. As with many other potentially revolutionary ideas (not to mention formerly independent rock bands), mainstreaming has brought conservatism and repackaging – dynamism and diversity giving way to formulaic projects and genres.

Consequently, while acting on commitments to end poverty and hunger signals no major departure from the way in which the WCED conceptualized sustainable development nearly 30 years ago, they do suggest a radical departure from the ways in which sustainability has largely been operationalized since then. For no matter how frequently policy documents quote the WCED definition, in practice, understanding of what sustainability really means has come to privilege either economic or environmental goals. In the ‘mostly economic’ (aka the ‘weak’ or ‘shallow’) version of sustainable development, the aim is to promote economic growth while either reducing or offsetting negative environmental and social impacts. And in the ‘mostly environmental’ (aka the ‘strong’ or ‘deep’)¹ version of sustainability, the aim is to prioritize ecosystem conservation while eschewing use of the word ‘development’ (too many economic overtones) and remaining sceptical about prospects for less resource-intensive growth. Neither version ignores poverty or other forms of inequality altogether, but neither do they treat poverty alleviation and social justice as first order priorities. The needs of the poor and marginalized are invoked constantly in support or opposition to particular development and policy proposals but they are all too quickly forgotten as combatants move on to the next point of conflict.

Such observations about sustainability discourse and policy are, of course, not new. Numerous scholars and social movement organizations have mobilized to re-assert the centrality of justice to sustainable development across a range of contexts – from marginalized urban communities resisting exposure to toxic hazards to indigenous peoples and small farmers struggling to preserve access to land and other livelihood resources (Busca and Lewis 2015). While the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs have rather more to say about equality than they do about the trickier concept of justice, by challenging attempts to privilege either economic growth or ecosystem conservation over equality and inclusion they reclaim, nonetheless, something of the spirit of Our Common Future.

Resilience theory and socio-ecological systems

Re-reading Our Common Future today, it is striking how little the WCED had to say about the resilience of socio-ecological (or social-ecological or eco-social) systems. In fact, they said virtually nothing. Given the popularity of these terms today – either as ways to conceptualize the linkages between social and environmental aspects of sustainability or, more ambitiously, as surrogates for the concept of sustainability – this begs a number of questions: is the resilience of socio-ecological systems something we have only more recently identified and begun to understand? Is system resilience itself, alternatively, a lower order priority?

Debate over the utility of resilience theory within sociology focuses, for the most part, on inadequate theorization of the social (Davidson 2010; Stuart 2016). The basic idea of resilience – of systems being able to absorb disturbance and/or reorganize to preserve essential functions and characteristics following disturbance – seems less controversial. Indeed, who would not want an ecosystem or a human community to recover from hardship? To thrive despite adversity? Resilience is a quality we value in our family and friends, in institutions that deliver important social goods, in the built environment, etc. It has a sense of everyday tangibility and desirability sometimes lacking in the more abstract and future-oriented notion of sustainability. The task, it would therefore seem, is to inflect resilience theory with more sophisticated insight into the roles of power, agency, values, solidarity, heterogeneity and conflict in social systems.

Resilience theory, undoubtedly, will benefit from sociological insight. To assume that a set of principles derived from observations of ecosystem adaptation could simply be transferred to jurisdictions, institutions, settlements and other so-called social and economic systems would be naïve. At the same time, understanding of what makes institutions more or less responsive to ecosystem change and other threats could facilitate the development of far more robust principles for socio-ecological resilience; principles that might, in the right circumstances, help stakeholders identify practical strategies to preserve and pursue shared values despite environmental change, risk and uncertainty.

If resilience is to be a genuinely useful concept, however, some tempering of the claims that typically swirl around resilience theory is required. Resilience is not a surrogate for sustainability. Why?

• Resilience is not an unambiguously desirable system characteristic. While there is some acknowledgement in the literature that undesirable system states may prove persistent, there is an inherent bias, nonetheless, towards identification of system attributes that promote seemingly positive outcomes – attributes such as learning, self-organization and diversity (Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale 2014). To be fair, the literature does not equate resilience exclusively with durability. It is accepted within resilience theory, for example, that incremental adaptation will not be sufficient to deal with global environmental change – that systems must be open to innovation and potentially far-reaching change (see Gillard 2016). Importantly though, this continues to equate resilience with positive change and positive outcomes. And it remains the case that resilience literature has very little to say about system attributes responsible for the persistence or indeed intensification of negative social outcomes such as poverty and exploitation.²

• Even when it is desirable, resilience is not necessarily a sole or first-order priority. Few would dispute, for example, the desirability of building resilience in communities vulnerable to natural hazards through strategies such as community-based disaster risk reduction. Identifying local resources and mobilizing residents to plan for and respond to extreme events is crucial in reducing vulnerability, particularly where the scale of risk is sufficient to potentially overwhelm the capacity of government and emergency services. However, vulnerability is never a function solely of exposure. It is a function of multiple dimensions of social, political and economic disadvantage – including inadequate access to emergency services, finance and insurance facilities, alternative livelihood options, and so on – which interact with exposure to disproportionately affect some people relative to others. The most effective ways to reduce hazard vulnerability are thus to deal with the root causes of poverty and exclusion, on the one hand, and failures of governance and service provision, on the other. Prioritizing ‘community resilience’ at very local scales masks the need to take collective responsibility for addressing inequality and sharing risk at larger scales (see also Tierney 2015).

• The applicability of systems thinking and metaphors to the social realm is limited. Words like ‘community’ and ‘society’ provide a convenient language with which to discuss the social but the imputation of system characteristics (i.e. functions, boundaries, components, etc.) to these units assumes a level of cohesiveness and benignness generally at odds with what social scientists know about the achievement of stability in social relationships (Bush and Marschke 2014; Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale 2014; Welsh 2014; Walters 2015). No amount of loading up the systems metaphor with concepts oriented towards understanding complexity and non-linearity resolves this problem. Neither does incorporation of sociological concepts like power and agency. While it may be pragmatically useful to consider strategies for improving the resilience of particular valued ‘social wholes’ (e.g. institutions or settlements), we should not assume that in doing this we are able somehow to incorporate the ‘whole of the social’.

• Resilience is neither a prerequisite for, nor a necessary outcome of, sustainable development. It is true that resilience signifies flexibility and fluidity, not rigidity and stasis. In many circumstances, such characteristics will support sustainable development while, in others, sustainability strategies will enhance capacities for flexibility and adaptability among communities and ecosystems. In other circumstances again, however, the prerequisite for, and outcome of, sustainable development will be rather more profound transformation of social and ecological relationships.³ And the more profound the transformations required by sustainable development, the less sense it makes to conceptualize them in terms of resilience. Too many existing socio-ecological relationships (the things we take for granted as ‘systems’) will be transmuted into, or superseded by, wholly new patterns of socio-ecological interaction.

makers, it is no great surprise resilience features so prominently in contemporary sustainability discourse. However, it is a concept that should be neither reified nor universalized (Bush and Marschke 2014). Doing so risks impoverishing our conception of the social and recasting the project of sustainable development as the responsibility of those who benefit least from existing social, political and ecological relationships (Welsh 2014). Too easily, the causal roles played by injustice, exploitation and corruption in the production of ‘unsustainability’ are forgotten, and critical scrutiny of policy and governance arrangements that tolerate injustice, exploitation and corruption is suspended.

Conclusion

The 2030 Agenda raises numerous challenges for sociologists. Monitoring progress against pre-defined goals is straightforward enough. So is pointing out gaps or rehearsing well-worn critiques of development and neoliberalism. More difficult is determining how best to understand and inform the innumerable institution and alliance building, decision-making, scientific and other activities required to meet the Agenda’s aspiration for economic, social and environmental transformation. There will be no one best way to approach this challenge, and many different approaches, it is to be hoped, will feature in the pages of Environmental Sociology. What is clear is that if sociological approaches are to be useful they must speak to multiple audiences, they must trouble both ‘mostly economic’ and ‘mostly environmental’ versions of sustainability, and they must reassert the centrality of social and environmental justice to sustainable development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The value-ladenness of these terms – ‘weak’ and ‘shallow’ versus ‘strong’ and ‘deep’ sustainability – is acknowledged. It is not endorsed.

2. For an exception to this generalization, see Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete’s (2011) analysis of how institutional inflexibility fosters maladaptive climate policy.

3. The need for transformative, rather than incremental, change is explicitly recognized in the UN’s 2030 Agenda resolution which is headed Transforming Our World (UN 2015).