Resilience

[Fuchs]

There's little to gain from fashions that are about symptoms instead of about causes.

[ptamas]

The notion of resilience, the ability and inclination for collective response to an external impact that damages or destroys formal institutions, is useful. Yes, the construct has been around for a long time. I don't mind the new term.

Right now we are all about standing up local government. This means we help local government deliver services (output legitimacy). The way we do this changes citizens into clients. They don't have to put anything in to get something out (no inputs required). This breeds dependency. We all know that. Dependency is a deficit. It tells us part of what is wrong, not what to grow.

For example

When I was in Bamiyan in 98 the farmers there just waited on their asses for the NGOs to come along and pay them through their shell of a local government to fix up the irrigation canals damaged by normal spring flooding like they did the year previous. This means that they did not have to work together to figure out how to do things on their own. Because they didn't have to work together, they lost one thing that forced them to work across tribal lines. Standing up local government, in this instance, strengthened divisions functional to conflict and undermined the networks of relationships/trust that enabled these folks to do things on their own. This version of standing up local government undermined it. We are doing the same today.

Talking about resilience adds the dimension of cross-difference relationships for collective action. It lets you see things you can't see when you talk about dependency. This ties better into an exit strategy. Resilient communities are likely more fertile ground for local democratic institutions.

Resilience is a useful notion today.
We'll find better language later.

[Seerov]

When John Robb talks of "resilience" he's talking about the creation of subsystems that people can fall back on if/when the global/national system(s) fail. The major unit of this resilience is the resilient community (RC), which is a community made up of people that provide alternatives for energy, food, security, communication, and transportation. These communities will share knowledge with other communities and depend greatly on open source methods for problem solving. This can range from sharing organic farming techniques to desktop manufacturing. Most important, RC's have the potential to give people meaning as work, family, community, and spirit intersect in ways that "globalization" and corporate created culture have failed to do.

[Steve the Planner]

Ptamas's comment:

Right now we are all about standing up local government. This means we help local government deliver services (output legitimacy). The way we do this changes citizens into clients. They don't have to put anything in to get something out (no inputs required). This breeds dependency. We all know that. Dependency is a deficit. It tells us part of what is wrong, not what to grow.

If we create linear, top-down governance systems, they are like a string of xmas lights; one bulb goes out and the whole string fails.

My friend did acute pediatric care in an urban hospital--lots of crack babies. He always marveled at the will to live; like in Jurassic Park---life will out. Most evident in any area faced with a natural disaster; immediately after, people struggle to get back on their feet---with or without international assistance. Baby needs to eat every day.

Somehow, we have created a consistent and repeating system of dependency that, over and again, either gets in the way of, or fails to ignite the natural instinct of people and communities to regenerate themselves.

It just should not be so hard, with human and community systems, to stabilize and reconstruct communities. We have a profound systemic error in our approaches that creates what ptamas described.

Resilience, like sustainability, lies beyond our approaches.