Resilience and sustainable development

1. Resilience This special issue results from a call for papers to address the connection between resilience and sustainability, and stems from the fact that the ecological concept of resilience has been exercising an increasing influence on the economics of development. Resilience is interpreted in two different ways by ecologists: one capturing the speed of return to equilibrium following perturbation (Pimm, 1984), the other capturing the size of a disturbance needed to dislodge a system from its stability domain (Holling, 1973). The latter may be interpreted as the conditional probability that a system in one stability domain will flip into another stability domain given its current state and the disturbance regime (Perrings, 1998). The relevance of this concept for the problem of sustainable economic development has been recognized for at least fifteen years (Common and Perrings, 1992). Indeed, Levin et al. (1998) claimed that resilience is the preferred way to think about sustainability in social aswell as natural systems, and a research network – the Resilience Alliance – has subsequently developed around the idea.1 The economic literature has since tended to focus on the non-convexity properties of the general system implied by the existence of multiple stable states, and the related problems of irreversibility and hysteresis (Brock et al., 2002; Brock and Starrett, 2003; Brock and Xepapadeas, 2004; Dasgupta and Mäler, 2004; Carpenter and Brock, 2004). Researchers in the Resilience Alliance and others writing from an ecological perspective have, by contrast, concentrated on the ecological properties that correlate with system resilience. They generally argue that two attributes of a system affect its resilience. One is its adaptive capacity, which is generally related to the heterogeneity of a system (Carpenter et al., 2001, Bengtsson et al., 2003) – broadly equivalent to the diversity amongst the institutions and assets available in social systems (Scheffer et al., 2001; Folke et al., 2002). A