Can Resilience be Reconciled with Globalization and the Increasingly Complex Conditions of Resource Degradation in Asian Coastal Regions?

• Main Authors: Derek Armitage, Derek Johnson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Resilience Alliance 2006-06-01
• Series: Ecology and Society
• Subjects: globalization; resilience; complexity; India; Indonesia; resource management; coastal management; social-ecological system; sustainability
• Online Access: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art2/

This paper explores the relationship between resilience and globalization. We are concerned, most importantly, with whether resilience is a suitable conceptual framework for natural resource management in the context of the rapid changes and disruptions that globalization causes in social-ecological systems. Although theoretical in scope, we ground this analysis using our experiences in two Asian coastal areas: Junagadh District in Gujarat State, India and Banawa Selatan, in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. We present the histories of resource exploitation in the two areas, and we attempt to combine a resilience perspective with close attention to the impact of globalization. Our efforts serve as a basis from which to examine the conceptual and practical compatibility of resilience with globalization. The first challenge we address is epistemological: given that resilience and globalization have roots in different disciplines, do they share a sufficiently common perception of change and human action to be compatible? Second, we address the issue of how resilience can be a viable management objective in the rapidly changing context of globalization. We identify scale as particularly important in this regard.