ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Towards a “Science of Surprise”: The Origins of Resilience Thinking in Postwar Ecosystem Ecology

• In Event: Histories of Climate and Environment 3: Diffusing and Disputing

English Abstract

Although resilience has become a policy priority and a cornerstone of environmental thought, critics maintain that it lends itself to decentralized, market-mediated approaches to environmental governance. Extending this critique, some political scientists have contended that resilience thinking gained popularity in the 1970s as part of a broad backlash against centralized planning that helped fuel the rise of neoliberalism. This paper offers a more specific genealogy of resilience based on its origins in postwar ecosystem science. I argue that, rather than anticipating neoliberal politics, the first theorists of resilience articulated a distinctive mode of governance grounded in reflexive policy design. In the late 1950s, Canadian ecologists working in natural resource management began challenging prevailing models of ecosystems as closed and homeostatic by developing alternatives that emphasized complexity, dynamism, and social interdependence. In this milieu, C. S. Holling developed the notion of “systems resilience,” which held that ecosystems appeared stable only when managers had simplified them beyond recognition. Healthy ecosystems, he argued, encompassed a degree of complexity that made them prone to instability, but responsive to changing conditions. In the 1970s, a Canadian-led team of international systems scientists designed a policy planning framework based on the idea that maintaining systems resilience required corresponding changes to the structure of governance. Their “adaptive management” approach assumed that intervening in complex systems inevitably led to unintended consequences and public discontent. They aimed to make policymaking itself more resilient through cybernetic safeguards that would prevent such cascading failures. Resilience thinking thus emerged from new scientific convictions regarding the instability and complexity of ecosystems, alongside a broad transition from goal-driven to process-based liberalism in politics and law.

Author

• Andrew Mitchell Hoyt, Princeton University