Collaborative Resilience ─ Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity

Crisis--whether natural disaster, technological failure, economic collapse, orshocking acts of violence--can offer opportunities for collaboration, consensus building, andtransformative social change. Communities often experience a surge of collective energy and purposein the aftermath of crisis. Rather than rely on government and private-sector efforts to deal withcrises through prevention and mitigation, we can harness post-crisis forces for recovery and changethrough innovative collaborative planning.

Drawing on recent work in the fields ofplanning and natural resource management, this book examines a range of efforts to enhanceresilience through collaboration, describing communities that have survived and even thrived bybuilding trust and interdependence. These collaborative efforts include environmental assessmentmethods in Cozumel, Mexico; the governance of a "climate protected community" in the BlackfootValley of Montana; fisheries management in Southeast Asia's Mekong region; and the restoration ofnatural fire regimes in U.S. forests.

In addition to describing the many formsthat collaboration can take--including consensus processes, learning networks, and truth andreconciliation commissions--the authors argue that collaborative resilience requires redefining theidea of resilience itself. A resilient system is not just discovered through good science; itemerges as a community debates and defines ecological and social features of the system andappropriate scales of activity. Poised between collaborative practice and resilience analysis,collaborative resilience is both a process and an outcome of collective engagement withsocial-ecological complexity.

Bruce Evan Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Planning and Design at the University of Colorado, Denver.