A panel session on

Crossing the Chasm – Crisis, Opportunity, and Transformation

for the Resilience Conference 2011, Arizona State University

Chair and organizer: Per Olsson, Stockholm Resilience Centre

Co-organizer: Frances Westley, Univeristy of Waterloo

This panel will explore the links between crisis, opportunity, and innovation for unlocking
social-ecological systems and creating radical shifts and transformations towards
sustainability. The point of departure for this panel is the notion that addressing missing
institutions is necessary to avoid looming global-scale failures. Reversing trends towards
crossing critical thresholds and tipping points in the Earth system may require radical
systemic shifts in deep values and beliefs, patterns of social behavior, and multi-level
governance and management regimes. Such responses can help to create a safe
operating space for humanity by enhancing the fit between human and biophysical
systems, crucial for securing, restoring, and developing the capacity of ecosystems to
generate ecosystem services. Such capacity is the very foundation for social and
economic development. A key question is whether or not the recent global climate
change crisis, food crisis, and financial crisis have triggered transformations towards
sustainability.

Large-scale sustainability transitions have proven to be difficult to achieve due to lock-ins

and stabilizing feedbacks in social-ecological systems (SES). The most common response
to crisis is to rebuild the pre-crisis system rather than transform it. Nevertheless,
complexity scholars argue that transformational change is most likely to occur at times of
crisis and instability, when enough stakeholders agree that the current system is
dysfunctional. Crises can potentially be used productively to stimulate experimentation,
innovation, novelty and learning within society and open up new trajectories of
sustainability. Resilience research in transformability focuses on how to “unlock” a
locked-in regime and escape from traps. Interacting lock-in mechanisms operate at
different levels and scales and in different parts of the system (social, economical,
ecological).

Panel presenters representing multiple perspectives including social innovation, social-

ecological systems, and resilience will discuss the patterns of transformations. We will
talk about the role of recent crises as well as mechanisms for linking innovations to
opportunity in order to achieve radical shifts. Specifically the panel presenters will
address several key questions:

- How can crises create windows of opportunity that help unlock unsustainable, locked-in
SES trajectories?
- What are the mechanisms for linking social innovations to a specific opportunity
context?
- What kinds of new initiatives, experiments, and innovations can open up new
trajectories of sustainability?
- What strategies can overcome barriers to scaling-up social innovations?
- What is the role of agency, and more specifically of institutional entrepreneurs, in
scaling-up processes?

Panel Presentations

1. Introduction by Per Olsson

2. Social disasters and barriers to transformation, Frances Westley, Social

Innovation Generation, University of Waterloo
Disasters are more likely to occur as the world becomes more interconnected and as we
push planetary boundaries to the limit. Some disasters can be anticipated, what Charles
Perrow called "normal disasters". Others result from the unanticipated consequences of
the interaction between system variables. In either case, societies' capacity to respond to
disasters is a measure of their capacity for resilience. This paper will explore such
dimensions as the role of time, of slow variables vs. fast variables, of social learning and
memory and the concept of "Murphy's waterbed", the propensity for disaster controlled
in one social arena to cause unanticipated disturbance in adjacent domains, to elucidate
how resilience theory can contribute to both understanding of and response to social
disasters.

3. Complexity perspectives in innovation and social change, Sander van der

Loeew, Department of Anthropology Arizona State University, USA
Many people expect that 'innovation' will lead us out of the current sustainability mess
we're in, yet do not realize that three centuries of innovation (i.e. the industrial
revolution and its aftermath) got us into the mess in the first place. Not only do we have
difficulty defining sustainability, but we do not really know how innovation works. Most
research has focused either on the conditions under which it occurs (e.g. Florida) or on
the results (e.g. 'the new economy'). This is not surprising, as our intellectual and
scientific tradition is essentially reductionist, and therefore not likely to help us
understand creativity, invention, innovation or in general the emergence of new
phenomena. The paper will argue that this approach is responsible for the emergence of
'unanticipated problems', and that these 'unanticipated problems' are likely to overwhelm
us unless we change our perspective into a generative one. I will then analyze some of
the barriers to such a generative approach, and argue that the complex adaptive systems
approach is part of a trend to begin to deal with this issue. Last, I will consider some of
the changes needed to our education system, our way of doing science, and our way of
thinking in general to enable us to improve our thinking about the future and reduce the
emergence of unanticipated problems.

4. Governance, Pathways and the Transformation of Global Agri-Food Systems,

John Thompson, The STEPS Centre and Future Agricultures Consortium and Institute of
Development Studies, UK

The nature of governance and pathways to sustainability are intimately intertwined in at

least two ways in global debates on the future of food and agriculture. First, global
agriculture and food security challenges in today's world are open to a variety of different
narratives - storylines - about problems and potential solutions, each suggesting
potential pathways to a more sustainable and socially just food future. Such narratives
are promoted by particular actors in specific contexts and embody different system
framings and goals. Moreover, they attend, to varying degrees and in different ways, to
issues of risk, uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance and different dynamic properties of
sustainability. But questions remain as to which narratives and pathways come to
dominate and which ones remain marginal or occluded – present perhaps only in the
imaginations of marginalized groups in a given situation. Furthermore, which pathways
are pursued and which are not is in large part a question of governance: a politics of
narratives and pathways shaped by power relations and institutions. This leads to the
second inherent interlinkage between governance processes and pathways to
sustainability: that political and institutional processes are often themselves key factors
implicated within the narratives and pathways themselves.

Drawing on recent research by The STEPS Centre, UK, this presentation will examine
how, in practice, these two dimensions of the interrelationship between governance,
narratives and associated pathways often merge in debates on the future of food and
agriculture. It will highlight how a process by which particular narratives give rise to
certain dominant innovation pathways in agricultural research and development and food
security policy are promoted by powerful actors, upholding the status of their institutions
and their power to intervene, manage or at least avoid blame for the situation. The
orientations of pathways thus interlock with the nature of governance, so that pathways
become, in effect, self-reinforcing, and reinforcing of existing power relations. In
contrast, other narratives – often those of more marginal actors, and supporting their
political and institutional interests – remain marginalized.

But does it have to be this way? This presentation will explore a range of processes,
styles and practices for governing food and agricultural systems in an era of growing
complexity. It will argue that, while some processes and practices reinforce narrow,
power-laden narratives and pathways, others offer prospects for incorporating more
effectively the goals and perspectives of marginalized groups, and the addressing the full
range of dynamic properties of sustainability.

5. Resilience and the ‘long crisis’ of globalization, David Steven, Center on

International Cooperation, New York University, USA
Globalization has entered a turbulent period. The drivers of change – including population
growth, climate change and resource scarcity, a major shift in economic power, and
increasing state fragility – produce unpredictable, non-linear effects. Technology
continues to diffuse rapidly, while information is corroding traditional hierarchies.
Security-related risks have become increasingly asymmetric.

Looking across the most important global risks, one sees that the world faces novel
challenges (e.g. managing bio-security) and needs to develop both unprecedented
institutions (e.g. resilient global carbon markets), and tough mechanisms for
enforcement (e.g. for nuclear proliferation or emissions control). Power shifts must be
managed both in the short term (economic imbalances) and over the long term
(demographic change). There are complex interactions between risks (energy and food
security, for example), while insurgent groups have attractive opportunities to disrupt
global networks (especially when state weakness and access to these networks coincide).

Pressure from these forces builds for long periods with no visible effect, but when
released, it triggers abrupt shifts and cascading consequences across interlinked global
systems. Shocks, rather than stresses, are the primary triggers of change, as three
global crises – the September 11 attacks in 2001, the combined food and oil price spike
that peaked in 2008, and the global financial crisis in the same year – have
demonstrated over the last decade.

Sustaining the benefits of globalization will depend on creating an international order that
is more resilient in the face of a range of risks. Resilient systems are those that can
absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to retain or enhance
effective function, structure, identity and feedbacks.

Resilience forces us to take the idea of failure seriously. It prompts us to plan for sudden
and disruptive changes, while providing a rationale for investing in redundant capacity for
emergency response (for example, in humanitarian and peacekeeping systems). It
encourages us to focus above all on the functions delivered by the international system,
rather than its organizational form. And it demands sustained investment in innovation,
allowing systems to respond to unfamiliar challenges such as climate change, fragile
states, and biosecurity.

A focus on risk and resilience has profound strategic implications. It will lead
governments to pursue fresh aims internationally, organize in different ways to gain
influence, and redirect resources in line with new priorities. In particular, they must work
towards the emergence of shared operating systems for managing global risks – a task
that will involve building shared awareness of common risks (both domestically and
internationally) and then the shared platforms (alliances between states and with non-
state actors) to tackle them.
The challenge facing globalization can be compared to ‘shooting the rapids’. Charting a
course through whitewater, there are many possible paths, but few attractive
destinations. It is the river, not the paddler, that dictates the speed with which the boat
moves. There is no opportunity to pause and rethink strategy, or to reverse direction: it
is the capacity to reorganize while undergoing change that ultimately determines the
journey’s outcome. Above all, the challenge is a collective one: the direction of the boat
depends on the combined efforts of all those on board.

6. Comments on the presentations by Derk Loorbach, DRIFT, Erasmus University,

The Netherlands