In The Resilience Doctrine (also available in our library here), we argue that globalization is both unstable and inevitable, and that governments have little choice but to build collaborative platforms to manage risk. We conclude with a dozen guidelines for building an international system fit for the 21st century.

1. Develop a doctrine with resilience at its heart, using it to create a unified narrative about how to manage the risks the world will face between now and 2030.
2. Start with the ultimate objective of building and protecting global systems, cultivating a new constitution for the society of states.
3. Create incentives for connecting to the international system and increase penalties for exclusion. Avoid disrupting the global order for short-term gain.
4. Focus on function (what systems need to deliver in order to manage risk) over form (the organogram that devotees of international politics obsess over).
5. Build the global institutions (rules, norms, markets, organizations, etc.) needed to deliver these functions. Aim for a shared operating system capable of managing each key risk.
6. Invest in mechanisms that create, analyze and debate solutions, delivering the shared awareness that underpins successful reform.
7. Build shared platforms on which state and non-state actors can work together to re-engineer systems. Sustain them over the long periods needed to battle for systemic change.
8. Use open standards to foster interoperability, allowing networks of organizations to work together and achieve elevated rates of innovation and learning.
9. Develop a theory of influence tailored to the modern age and use it to bind together all the instruments of international relations (diplomacy, development, military).
10. Apply a rigorous principle of subsidiarity, devolving responsibilities to regional, national and local levels where possible, thus maximizing resilience throughout the system.
11. Use the opportunity to reform national governments, increasing their openness, while reducing the scope of their mission so that they do less, better.
12. Be accountable for outcomes, using shared metrics and external assessors to report publicly on whether resilience is increasing for those risks that will mean most to the future of our civilization.

We have a global market system that is subverting the nation state, so gaps where local control is lost are going to spring up all over the place, even in relatively developed states. There will be lapses where non-state groups like global guerrillas take control. If they’ve found a hole in West Africa, there are no barriers to their expansion.

Although they are drawn to “hollow states” like Guinea-Bissau, however, contrary to dire warnings of instability from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime the South Americans are unlikely to want to shake up the status quo too much. According to John Robb:

They don’t want warfare in West Africa – they want the maximum level of corruption and to be left alone, with bureaucratic apparatus geared towards helping them to do business. Almost across the board you’ll see that non-state groups are not trying to take over the national government. They don’t want that burden – it raises the profile, puts you on the international radar screen and leads to economic blockades. If there’s a nominal government in place they’ll keep the infrastructure up – they’re parasites off the infrastructure.

I asked Robb how Africa might deal with the problem, which got him talking about resilient communities:

We’ve been talking about African development for quite a while now and it’s pretty much all over the map. We tend to go from the top down, which minimises the long-term impact due to the level of corruption and the complexity of the problem. The better route to development in Africa and other developing societies where there is widespread instability is to go from the bottom up.

What I’m trying to do with the resilient community idea is to develop a community model in small communities – making them economically sustainable so they can power themselves forward. If you do that you can combat this external interference; if the national grid goes down or if there’s national instability, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of whatever progress you’ve made at the community level. You can continue to add and grow and if there’s a sufficient number of these organic groups, they can link up and form the basis of stability.

This sounds great, but when I asked how you could promote such communities in West Africa – where the old village and tribal groupings, which had evolved over millennia to resist an extremely harsh environment, were destroyed by slavery and colonialism and what is left has been raped by corrupt leaders or crippled by aid dependency – Robb admitted “we haven’t cracked it yet, even in the West where we’ve abdicated any kind of local production capacity to the global system.”

I wonder if leaving communities to develop their own resilience might be more effective (and cheaper) than trying to push them into it with the help of aid (see Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages project for an example of the latter – and see this Overseas Development Institute paper for a sceptical review of the project). In his book, John Robb predicts that it will take severe shocks to encourage communities in the West to become more resilient. West Africans have dealt with many shocks over the centuries, but Western intervention in their affairs proved too much for them and they buckled. Perhaps if we get out of the way (or “remove the barriers” as Richard Dowden puts it in his excellent new book), they might once again evolve their own mechanisms for coping with a challenging world.

I’m taking part in a roundtable on community resilience, 4&5GW and the decline of the state. The aim of the roundtable is to bring together individuals from a range of backgrounds to challenge current thinking and assumptions in our present political and societal systems.  Two presentations which I’ll be live blogging on will be Chet Richards on Mindsets and Character and John Robb on Community Resilience. There is no set agenda for the conference. This afternoon we will be running a series of open sessions… one of which is likley to be on community resilience.

If you have a question for Chet or John send me a tweet. Update: Thanks for the questions – answers will be tweeted soon. 

Update: Notes from John Robbs’ presentation after the jump + MP3 of Chet.

Chet Richards‘ OODA Loop refresher is valuable. Listen here (mp3)

John Robb on Resilient Communities

What we all fear: Soup Kitchens in 2011

• Current financial policies are creating a more complex system – instead of reducing instability they are creating more uncertainty in both the short and medium term. Put simply – we don’t understand the system we are operating in.
• Supersystem: Global market place rests on tightly coupled systems (think: buying food off the shelf in Tesco’s alerts its system to place an order for product in China).
• This global system is weakening and hollowing out the nation state. The nation state’s responsibility for finance, borders, and food security is weakened and in some cases has been lost. The reasons for this is because:
• It’s too big: Even working in concert, nation states will not be able to stabilise the system.
• It’s too complex: There are too many moving parts and too many connections between the parts to grasp the problems. We live on bad assumptions. Example – the whole economics profession were wrong about the global financial system.
• It’s too quick: Governments are incapable of responding to the rapid pace of change. Crises morph over time leaving nation states which aren’t able to synthesis the information and act on it behind the power curve
• Black Swans will happen more often.
• Radical slow down in economic activity has had an effect on lowering oil prices. It is likely we will become complacent and will therefore not diversify.
• Disruption: Most noticeably in the unavailability of goods: As in Iceland as well as black and brown outs in South Africa.
• Superempowerment: Moore’s Law – small groups are riding this curve – (CE note: see Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody – p215)

Net Result: Catastrophe.

We will see a lot of dead ends. In terms of security we may see a ratcheting up of the police state as people resort to low level criminality slowing the system down.

This requires a new form of resilience:

1. Emergence of a transition culture: See Rob Hopkins work on Transition towns

2. Platforms: The necessity of cooperative structures. Imagine a Bow tie – the left bow are the suppliers, the knot are the core services and the right hand bow are Users. The knot, the platform of the system needs to be fair, connected, and two way. In terms of Resilient Communities the problem is that we have given up the platforms at the community level and are resting on a global system which is becoming too complex to manage and therefore unstable. We need to identify solutions that rebuild local level systems. In terms of community resilience we can think of the following:

Local Power: We are currently in an ‘energy gap’ oil is running out but solar technology is still immature. One approach is to adopt microgrids based on military surety grids:

Local food: As the food crisis last year demonstrated food is rapidly disappearing. People will need to begin to grow their own food. In suburban in the UK for instance, the number of allotments is increasing . Entrepreneurs will begin to buy land from owners to grow their own food and sell it to local markets.

Local money: Money will become increasingly scarce through hoarding. But will local currencies make a come back? Some examples of this in action: Lewes Pound

Local Security: Number of good examples including Hurricane Katrina and The Bridge to Gretna:

When Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans three months ago, thousands of people left in the city were trapped with no food, no water and no shelter. They were desperate to escape the devastation. The bridge that spans the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Gretna was one of the few ways out, until police from Gretna used force to stop pedestrians from crossing it.

You read that correctly.The Gretna local police stopped residents of New Orleans escaping over the Bridge and what’s more:

Since most of the police officers were white and most of the evacuees were black, the incident quickly took on racial overtones.