What is resilience?

Principle 1. Develop a complexing perspective

The tendency to focus on enterprises or industries in isolation from the whole system has reduced resilience by missing critical linkages, feedbacks and unintended consequences. While agricultural production and food processing are critical to economic and employment growth, the long-term resilience and wellbeing of the region is dependent on other factors such as ageing and declining populations, lifestyle land ownership, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. Developing an understanding and capacity to plan and work with this complexity is one of the most powerful steps we can take towards building a resilient region.

Principle 2. Develop governance that embraces change

Governance approaches that embrace change help a region to prepare for, respond to and learn from change. The Goulburn Broken Irrigation Futures project in the early 2000s clearly identified a suite of issues that were the precursors to most of the serious challenges the region now faces. A recent review of that work showed that despite its high quality, extensive process, the governance system was unable to move away from business as usual. We want to learn from that failure by developing an approach that can embrace change.

Principle 3. Foster cohesion, self-organisation and local responsibility

Because no one group has control of a complex system, no one can build resilience on their own. Resilience building must be a system wide, collective process. Self-organisation, local decision making, and cohesion are important for addressing local scale problems. There is very clear evidence that communities with strong social capital and capacity to self-organise suffer less during shocks and disasters and recover faster.

Principle 4. Design for flexibility

Flexibility offers long term regional resilience in the face of uncertainty by allowing for future adaptation at lower cost.

It is crucial to avoid “lock-in traps”, which occur when system feedbacks become self-reinforcing, preventing change. For example, it is possible that the relatively ‘fixed’ footprint of current infrastructure (roads, channels) may reduce land use and production system diversity. A key lesson from the Connections project is that while there may be a higher up-front cost for investing in flexibility, in the longer term it is likely to be worth it.

Principle 5. Manage networks and connectivity

Shifting demographics and land uses create new system dynamics for the region. For example:

• The shift from largely rural communities to increasingly urban or lifestyle communities may have implications for how agriculture is practiced.
• Management of wastes and emissions from intensive animal systems requires system wide focus.
• Habitat connectivity is crucial for biodiversity, allowing species to move.

Principle 6. Value, retain and build response and recovery capacity

Buffers, reserves, diversity and redundancy provide long term shock absorption and rapid recovery capacity to systems. A number of recent studies suggest the economic benefits of building response and recovery capacity are significant, but that those benefits are realised over longer time frames. The prevailing paradigm is focused on shorter term efficiency and economic return at the expense of these capacities.

A Goulburn Murray example is maintenance of surface and subsurface drainage capacity, which will support future response and recovery capacity to wetter periods if and when required. Another example is Victoria’s water allocation policy. By using a rolling 2-year process it creates reserves and buffers against dry conditions.

Principle 7. Orientate towards slow variables, leverage & tipping points

There are a number of slow variables that continue to play a critical role in shaping the Goulburn Murray Region, including terms of trade on traditional commodities, labour costs and regulations, and climate change. Slow changes make the system more vulnerable to short term shocks by eroding capacity to prepare, respond and recover.

For example, lower commodities prices over time reduce buffers and reserves of capital. As a result, short term spikes in input costs or interest rates, limit the capacity to pay debt. These immediate challenges can become acute when the system has ground slowly towards a major tipping point. Teasing out the short and long-term dynamics and the presence of tipping points can generate important insights for dealing with the underlying cause of change.

Principle 8. Learn for change

Learning is critical in complex systems. Learning needs to be fostered and structured to allow local scale innovations to develop, be tested and then scaled up.

The decline in government funded Research, Development and Extension (RD&E) means a new approach to learning and innovation needs to evolve that best suits the complexity of the Goulburn Murray region. This model requires novel partnerships across private and public institutional boundaries. It requires mechanisms to collect, synthesise and share learning and a governance system that can support and enable innovations to scale up and out.