# Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses

*Folke · Ecological & Commons, Complexity & Systems · Global Environmental Change · 2006 · Open access*

Folke's review is the paper that turned resilience from an idea in ecology into a travelling framework for coupled human and natural systems, and it is the natural review anchor for this cluster: where Holling (1973) supplies the origin and Walker and colleagues the tight definition, Folke supplies the map of how the perspective grew and what it now contains. Its most useful contribution for organisational readers is a distinction it draws sharply and then tabulates: engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. Engineering resilience is the speed with which a system returns to a single equilibrium after a shock, and its concerns are return time, efficiency, constancy and recovery; it is, in Folke's phrase, about resisting disturbance and conserving what you have. Ecological resilience is something larger, the amount of disturbance a system can absorb before it crosses a threshold into a different regime altogether, and its concern is persistence across multiple possible states rather than return to one. A third and broadest reading, social-ecological resilience, adds the capacity to reorganise, learn and transform, so that resilience is not only about absorbing shocks but about what the shock opens up. The reason the distinction matters here is diagnostic: most of what passes for resilience in management and wellbeing talk is engineering resilience wearing the vocabulary of the ecological kind, a demand to bounce back fast to a prior steady state, which is close to the opposite of the adaptive, reorganising capacity the fuller concept names. Folke sets this inside the adaptive cycle and Holling and Gunderson's panarchy (exploitation, conservation, release, reorganisation, nested across scales, with the neglected 'backloop' of release and renewal treated as being as important as the orderly growth phases), and against the command-and-control pathology of resource management, in which controlling a single variable for short-term stability homogenises the system and strips out the heterogeneity that let it absorb shocks in the first place. Two things make the paper especially useful for a corpus resisting the optimisation of psychological safety into a measurable deliverable. First, Folke is explicit that resilience is not inherently good: a system can be highly resilient in a degraded or undesirable state, the lock-in trap, so the operative question (borrowed from Carpenter and colleagues) is always resilience of what, to what, and for whom. Second, the sustaining-and-developing dialectic, that too much stability and too much change both end in collapse, is a direct rebuke to management regimes that pursue constancy as though it were safety. The cautions are worth stating plainly. This is avowedly a narrative rather than a technical paper, and a movement-building one, dense with citations to the author's own Resilience Alliance, so it reads at times as advocacy for a research programme as much as a neutral survey; and the social-ecological framework it consolidates has been criticised since for under-theorising power and politics, since a system's resilience can just as easily mean the durability of an unjust arrangement, which is precisely why the resilience-of-what-for-whom question has to be asked and answered rather than assumed. (Text drawn from the 2006 Global Environmental Change review, 16(3), pp. 253–267.)

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