Not shocked but stressed
In a recent post on Global Dashboard, I wrote about resilience, drawing on thinking that Alex and I have been developing together for a new project we hope to launch later this year.
The post was triggered by David Miliband’s argument that one of the defining features of the era we live in is a shift in the balance of responsibilities between state and citizen. It was a mistake to assume this would lead to greater stability, I argued. The key question is whether, when faced with a distributed threat, our systems become more resilient or less so.
Lloyd Anderson, head of science at the British Council and an ecologist, pointed out to me that it is helpful to think about three levels of influence on a system: trends, stresses and shocks.
Trends are gradual shifts in a system’s composition and context. Shocks are immediate and catastrophic. Stresses sit somewhere in the middle, and tend to affect a complex system in a particular way. Under pressure, the system ‘resists’ change up to an unpredictable point. It then shifts rapidly – and usually irreversibly – to another equilibrium.
We pay plenty of attention to shocks and trends. The former sell newspapers, while the latter keep social scientists in work. But stresses are deadly, both because they fly beneath the radar, and because they have the potential to lead to deep-seated changes that undermine the basis of our way of life.
Take two examples: the 2003 heat wave in Europe and the slow-burn insurgency in the Niger delta. (more…)