209Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand: Volume 39, Number 4, December, 2009 209-2131175-8899 (Online); 0303-6758 (Print)/09/3904-0209 © The Royal Society of New Zealand 2009

Forum

Social-ecological resilience thinking: can indigenous cultureguide environmental management?

Stephanie Rotarangi1 and Darryn Russell2

Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organise so as toretain the same structure, function, feedbacks and therefore identity (Walker 2009). Resiliencetheory places emphasis on discovering the limits to the amount of change a system can handlebefore destabilising, and thresholds (tipping points) between alternate states or regimes. Todate, many of the concepts of resilience theory have emerged from ecology (Holling 1973).However, more recently it has been acknowledged that ecological and social systems are linkedin complex and adaptive ways, and it is increasingly evident that many ecosystems previouslyconsidered to be 'natural' are actually co-evolved cultural-ecological systems (Berkes et al.2003; Thomas 2009 this issue).

Indigenous societies tend to operate at small and local scales, often in remote places, andsustain livelihoods at the margin of the dominant society. Examples include the tītī harvest-ers on remote southern islands of New Zealand (Stevens 2006) and the Hewa forest peopleof Papua New Guinea (Thomas 2009 this issue). Their relationships with local resourceshave shaped their culture and are coupled to local ecosystems, and they maintain governanceinstitutions that draw on oral traditions, local and traditional knowledge, and connection totheir ancestral places (Gaze & Smith 2009 this issue). A common feature of indigenous en-vironmental planning is long-term goal setting and deep historical reference to past resourcechanges that provide an intergenerational awareness of social-ecological processes and change(Kofinas 2009). Their small population size, isolation and difficulty in participating fully inenvironmental planning and resource management institutions (Bullard 1993) may add totheir vulnerability to economic, social and ecological shocks that threaten their traditionallifeways.

However, to be indigenous is to be resilient. The maintenance and evolution of identityand culture of indigenous people and communities is premised on such resilience. Resiliencethinkers have much to learn from the ways locally-based societies manage and respond to theirlocal ecologies and natural resource perturbations. At the same time, social-ecological resilienceis a potentially useful framework for guiding indigenous societies on how best to respond tothe shocks that have destabilised their own cultures—colonisation, monetary markets, globalfood systems, corporate resource exploitation, global threats like climate change, and eveninvasions of scientists (Berkes et al. 2003,2005,2009 this issue; Moller et al. 2009 this issue;Robson et al. 2009 this issue). But the application of resilience thinking by external theoristsand management professionals creates risks for the participating societies.

1 Centre for Study of Agriculture, Food & Environment (CSAFE), University of Otago, PO Box 56,Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.

2 Kāi Tahu, Director Māori Development, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054,New Zealand.

R09026; Received and accepted 6 November 2009; Online publication date 26 November 2009

210 Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 39, 2009

Some of these issues were discussed at the first meeting of the Resilience Alliance WorkingGroup on Indigenous Peoples and Social-Ecological Resilience in Hinchinbrook, Australia on10-13 March 2009. Participants were from Alaska, Australia, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand,Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom and represented resilience thinkers from theecological side, the social side and/or indigenous peoples. The mandate of the first meeting wasto discuss the resilience of local cultures that had historically (or currently) been confrontedby the forces of a dominant society. The aim was to develop a pathway forward for discuss-ing how to learn with and from the resilience of local social systems and, where requested, towork with people of those systems to support their responses to change. Participants sharedcase studies where ecological issues had triggered a strong social response from the connectedindigenous communities (see Table 1).

Table 1 Case studies discussed at the Resilience Alliance Working Group on Indigenous Peoples andSocial-Ecological Resilience meeting in Hinchinbrook, Australia.Case

Alaska

Central Australia

Seri FishersMexicoNew ZealandMāori

KenyanMaasiland

South AfricanamaXhosa

Ecological trigger

Rapid climatechange.Weed invasion andchanging climate.Fishery over-exploitation.Deforestation.

Seasonally mobilefarmers confined todesignated reserves.Grazing limits.

Result

Change in availabilityof traditional food.Loss of traditionalecosystems.Loss of traditionalemployment.Loss of traditionalsubsistence.

Change in traditionalgrazing methods.

Increase in woody weedsresults in more people tolive closer together.

Cultural response

Subsistence communities changeresource sharing.Corresponding loss of languageand lifestyle.Ethnographic and participatoryapproaches.Unprecedented combining ofresources between families toensure cultural values not lost.Animals become commodity asopposed to a mechanism of socialconnectiveness.Interplay of beliefs and changinglivelihoods.

In the above cases an ecological change has led to an obvious change in traditional lifestyle forthe communities embedded in that landscape. Of interest to resilience researchers was whetherthe traditional practices of the culture groups had enhanced the resilience of the communitiesto these shocks or had stifled resilience through rigid rules and practices. The examples alsoraised several key questions:

• Are we studying resilience or persistence?• How do we interconnect the Western notion of resilience with indigenous understanding

of tradition?• Why do responses vary between communities of the same culture, and therefore how do

we define exclusion levels?

Discussion at the meeting highlighted a somewhat predicable difference in understandingbetween resilience thinkers from the ecological side, the social side and/or indigenous peoples.As two of the participants at the workshop, we have subsequently reflected that such segrega-tion may be underlain by two fundamental challenges to both resilience theory and relatedapproaches to environmental research and management: (a) the ability of resilience theory toincorporate and legitimise cultural knowledge, and (b) issues of power and management arisingfrom the implementation of resilience theory. In particular we note that prior to colonisationand ensuing impacts on societal, environmental and social structures of whānau, hapū and iwi,

Rotarangi & Russell—Cross-cultural environmental research and management 211

the premise of resilience was always part of sustainability goals to support future generations.This is well articulated in the Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu whakatauki:

Mō tātou, ā, mō kā uri ā muri ake neiFor us and our children after us

Note that the subsequent discussion is the authors' reflections, not those of the ResilienceAlliance working group on indigenous peoples and social-ecological resilience.

Firstly, if resilience theory is to be expanded as a stepping stone between Western scienceparadigms and the recognition of the legitimacy of indigenous theory, then the cultural com-ponent of social-ecological resilience thinking needs to be further investigated for compat-ibility and expanded on in resilience analysis. Cultural dimensions such as the role of socialrelations, world view and language are integral to the way indigenous societies understandand interact with the ecological systems that they are intrinsically linked to (Langston 1995;Kawharu 2002; Mead 2003; Guha 2006; Rotarangi & Thorp 2009). Furthermore, indigenouspeoples' long and intimate connection with land and ecological wellbeing is intimately linkedto social wellbeing. In fact Māori whakapapa spans from the physical to the spiritual and inmythological creation stories contemporary societies genealogically descend frompapatuanuku(mother earth) (Rangiahau 1992).

Therefore with respect to resilience concepts, the ecological is not disconnected from thesocial, from the economic, from the spiritual, nor from the personal or collective actors. Whenresilience thinkers build models, reductionism and specificity can kick in: there is a call fordefining the problem as resilience of X in relation to Y (e.g., Walker et al. 2002) and socialactors and their attitudes become black boxes in flow diagrams (e.g., Kinzig et al. 2006). Thereis a fundamental mismatch in the specific resilience modelling agenda and the holistic worldview of indigenous knowledge asserted by Māori, for example (Moller et al. 2009; Williams2009 this issue). The differences between the inherent compartmentalism of science and theholistic understanding of many indigenous peoples need to be appreciated to ensure resiliencetheory is not an example of a system where science is being applied outside the limits of itscapability (Walker et al. 2006). Other aspects of resilience thinking may however be of someassistance in strengthening indigenous societies, such as the promotion of strong networks,access to resources, fostering strong leadership, building confidence and sense of self, facili-tating a sense of group purpose, and finding new ways to learn (Hegney et al. 2008; Atkinsonet al. 2009).

A second key challenge for resilience thinkers and resilience-informed environmentalmanagers when working with indigenous societies is to ensure resilience theory is not ap-plied as yet another colonising model, retaining power and legitimised knowledge in thehands of the dominant society. The painful history of colonisation makes local indigenoussocieties already 'destabilised' in resilience terms, as well as highly sensitised to externallyderived models or constructs about how local worlds work. As resilience thinking progressesfrom defining critical vulnerabilities and tipping points within ecologies to defining those inindigenous societal structures, it becomes incumbent to support the social-cultural resilienceof those who have the longest and most intimate relationship with those ecologies. In reality,this will mean sharing power and authority over natural resources through such things as en-abling traditional management tools, allowing traditional harvests, and establishing devolvedor inclusive decision-making and governance structures and processes (Jacobson & Stephens2009 this issue; Zurba 2009 this issue).

In summary, social-ecological resilience has so far mostly been discussed in the absence ofcritical cultural dimensions and holistic concepts which define indigenous communities (e.g.,culturally specific local dynamics, connections to place, language and social relationships).

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If resilience is to be relevant to societies in which people have a long-term relationship withland and resources, but have been disempowered by a dominant society, then a new tangentis required, and possibly more culturally oriented methodologies. For example, it is question-able what aspects of cultural resilience are possible to model as a series of basic facts or laws,within which social-cultural variables can be tightly controlled or independently manipulated.It is more likely we can improve our understanding of resilience by extracting general rulesof thumb about the fundamental processes that structure the interactions between ecologicalsystems and indigenous societies. A key contestation of purpose and function for the resiliencetheorist is how to learn with indigenous people for the betterment of their societies, and whererequested, to work to support and strengthen their systems in response to change. This was anagreed outcome of the Resilience Alliance working group on indigenous peoples and social-ecological resilience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge all the participants of the Resilience Alliance Working Group on IndigenousPeoples and Social-ecological Resilience along with their funders, in particular the Christensen Fund,the Sara Halvadene Foundation in Australia and the University of Otago.

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