Adaptive Cycle

Working across earth and social sciences, this article reevaluates resilience’s conceptual framework, drawing out alternative pathways for understanding and responding to the dislocations of the Anthropocene. Via a critical reading of the Anthropocene with the help of resilience’s adaptive cycle heuristic, I locate the possibility of new forms of life in its phase of release and reorganisation: the back loop. More than a brief, negative phase to govern or navigate, I argue that the back loop o ers the possibility for a practical orientation to the Anthropocene based on experimentation with new uses, release of old frameworks, and allowance for the unknown. Inhabiting the back loop, as I call it, articulates an ethos couched not in fear or survival but rather creative and technical audacity in unsafe operating space, as embodied already in a variegated landscape of practitioners.

It has been suggested that the expansion of farming in western Eurasia was paced by Holocene cooling phases. However, the immediate effects and the mechanisms could not be explained. Based on a fine-graded data set of the west-central European early Neolithic Linear pottery culture a refined model of the interaction between climate variability and both population growth as well as decline is presented. The changing interrelation between these fluctuations may more thoroughly explain the step-wise advance of farming in western Eurasia.

The mid-Holocene was an extremely dry period in the Lake Titicaca Basin of South America, when lake levels were at their lowest point in the Holocene. South of the lake, a lack of outflow and very low and irregular precipitation would have created desert-like conditions. This area's 'archaeological silence' seems to reflect an effective lack of population. This situation changed drastically as lake levels rose suddenly in the centuries following 3540 cal BP. As the desert disappeared, a flux of migrants filled the landscape, probably from the population concentration in the basin's western highlands. They imported and developed new technologies and economic practices and reorganized them into an agropastoral lifeway. The emergence of agropastoralism was both rapid and widespread, as people throughout the Lake Titicaca Basin adopted this practice. This major, regional shift can be productively framed as an adaptive cycle or Holling loop. This approach builds on the robust foundation of complexity theory, emphasizes the integrated nature of humans and their environment in a single system, highlights how systems fluctuate between slow and accelerated change, and is useful for developing hypotheses. Cascading feedback loops in climate, ecology, and cultural practices generated the emergence of agro-pastoralism. This resilient system is still in use today and is currently facing major climate changes, which makes understanding its origins especially relevant.

Scientific findings forecast that one of the major consequences of human induced climate change and global warming is a greater occurrence of extreme weather events with potentially catastrophic effects for organizations, industries, and society. Current management and adaptation approaches typically focus on economic factors of competition, such as technology and innovation. Although offering useful insights, these approaches are potentially ill equipped to deal with any increases in drastic changes in the natural environment. This article argues that discussions on organizational adaptation need to be broadened and that new conceptual and practical approaches are needed to incorporate the effects of climate change and a greater occurrence of weather extremes into corporate strategy and
decision making. The authors advance the notion that a resilience framework might provide insights into dealing with new types of environmental change. They contend that by developing resilience, organizations can develop resources and capabilities to avoid or minimize organizational collapse and to reorganize in light of discontinuities associated with climate change and
weather extremes. Implications for organizational practice and research are discussed.

in: T. Link/J. Pyzel, Kulturkontakt und Kommunikation. Fokus Jungsteinzeit. Berichte der AG Neolithikum 5. Kerpen-Loogh 2017, 101-121

Kurzzusammenfassung

In diesem Artikel wird eine zyklische Betrachtungsweise der Geschichte des mitteleuropäischen Neolithikums erprobt. Das Konzept des „adaptiven Zyklus“ aus der sozio-ökologischen Resilience-Theorie wird auf archäologisches Material übertragen, um die Entwicklung archäologischer Kulturen zu beschreiben. Einleitend wird das Resilience-Konzept kurz vorgestellt. Der Hauptteil der Untersuchung widmet sich dann einem Fallbeispiel, dem Jungneolithikum am Bodensee (40. – 34. Jh. v. Chr.). Für die Pfyner Kultur am Bodensee können verschiedene Entwicklungsstadien unterschieden werden. Diese Phasen werden in Analogie zum sozio-ökologischen „adaptiven Zyklus“ als Phasen des Wachstums (r), der Konservierung (K), der Auflösung (Ω) und der Reorganisation (α) des kulturellen Systems interpretiert. Abschließend wird das Ergebnis mit von anderen Autoren beobachteten Zyklen im mitteleuropäischen Neolithikum verglichen und die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten der Resilience-Theorie werden diskutiert.


Abstract

This paper examines the development of the Central European Neolithic from a cyclic perspective. The concept of “adaptive cycles”, derived from the socio-ecological Resilience Theory, is employed to describe the development of archaeological cultures. First, the concept of resilience is introduced. In the main section a case study the development of the Young Neolithic (40th – 34th century BC) at Lake Constance is presented. The Pfyn Culture passes through different phases. These phases are interpreted as growth, conservation, release and re-organisation phase of the “adaptive cycle”. The results are compared with the observation of other cycles in the Central European Neolithic and further applications of Resilience Theory are discussed.

Father of resilience theory C.S. Holling has a useful way of thinking about a time like this. He calls it a “back loop.” This concept refers to the adaptive cycle, the main heuristic used by resilience ecologists to describe the four phases of life experienced by all natural systems–a human being, a city, a society, a civilization, a swamp, a forest, a company. On one hand, the adaptive cycle contains a “front loop” of early rapid “growth,” leading to a “persistence” or “stability” phase dominated by a few species and characterized by rigidity and the capture of earlier energies. Those “stable” states are not permanent. Gradual or sharp disturbance can cause systems to slip into a “back loop,” marked by a “release” phase where energies and elements previously captured in conservation phases are set free, unexpected new combinations emerge, and wild, exuberant experimentation becomes the modus operandi. The most understudied aspect of ecological systems, back loops are also one of the most exciting. As observed in ecological systems, the back loop is the phase of life in which individual organisms or small groups of individual organisms interact across previously unbridgeable divides and in doing create something fundamentally original. In contrast to life in the regimes we are leaving behind, where innovation was stifled and influence limited to a few actors with the greatest power—the stability “trap”—in the back loop beings and things are released and open to new potentials.29 Although most back loops studied by ecologists have been regional in character, in 2004 Holling penned an essay suggesting that “we are at the time of a large-scale back loop,” a global situation in which “each of us must become aware that he or she is a participant.”30 I think Holling’s challenge is important; but it is also an apt description of a phenomenon already underway.

If we accept being in a back loop, the question becomes, how do we respond? Do we try desperately to maintain the old “safe operating space,” freeze a process already in motion? Or could we let go, allow a time of exploration and experimentation, see what becomes of the pieces of us and the world?

This paper deploys the adaptive cycle as a construct to understand the dynamics of community engagement and partnership building during an international service-learning project. A multi-disciplinary team of USA-based university students collaborated with a local community in Zambia to build two ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrines. Post-field project reflection challenged the “product-first” view commonly held in service learning projects. Time was a central point of post-field reflection. Through critical scrutiny, the student team came to recognize that contextually sensitive relationship building had been essential in enabling community ownership of the project. The construct of the adaptive cycle provided a crucial analytical tool for tracing the process through which partners from very different backgrounds achieved a sense of common purpose and opened the way for an understanding of community engagement as weaving a thread through the complex dynamics of partnership. The adaptive cycle may be useful as a preparation and implementation framework for other service-learning projects emanating from institutions of higher education.

This dissertation describes the urban actors and spatial practices that contribute to natural urban resilience in Addis Ababa’s inner city. Natural urban resilience is a non-strategical and bottom-up, everyday form of general urban resilience – an urban system’s ability to maintain its essential characteristics under any change. This study gains significance by exposing conceptual gaps in the current un-derstanding of general urban resilience and highlighting its unconvincing applicability to African cities. This study attains further relevance by highlighting the danger of the ongoing large-scale redevelopment of the inner city. The inner city has naturally formed, and its urban memory, spaces, and social cohesion contribute to its primarily low-income population’s resilience. This thesis argues that the inner city’s demolition poses an incalculable risk of maladaptation to future stresses and shocks for Addis Ababa. The city needs a balanced urban discourse that highlights the inner city’s qualities and suggests feasible urban transformation measures. “Natural Urban Resilience” contributes an empirical study to the debate by identifying those aspects of the inner city that contribute to general resilience and identifies feasible action areas. This study develops a qualitative research design for a single case study in Addis Ababa. The data is obtained through expert interviews, interviews with resi-dents, and the analysis of street scene photos, which are abstracted using Grounded Theory. That way, this thesis provides first-time knowledge about who and what generates urban resilience in the inner city of Addis Ababa and how. Furthermore, the study complements existing theories on general urban resilience. It provides a detailed understanding of the change mechanisms in resilience, of which it identifies four: adaptation, upgrading, mitigation, and resistance. It also adapts the adaptive cycle, a widely used concept in resilience thinking, conceptually for urban environments. The study concludes that the inner city’s continued redevelopment poses an incalculable threat to the entire city. Therefore, “Natural urban resilience” recommends carefully weighing any intervention in the inner city to promote Addis Ababa’s overall resilience. This dissertation proposes a pattern language for natural urban resilience to support these efforts and to translate the model of natural urban resilience into practice.

Urgency: requisite aesthetics for comprehension of new thinking?
Range: proxemics and dilution of experiential connectivity
Sacrifice: as organized by "generals"?
Attraction: sensual proximity and evocation of engagement
Local "force" vs Global "gravity"-- or the reverse?
Scale: power laws exemplified by the square-cube law
Human potential: via mysterious coupling of extremes?
Experiential paradoxes of attraction (or repulsion)
Perspective: thinking globally and acting locally -- epicycles or hypercycles?
Exaptation: embodying innovation into the "adaptive cycle"
Embodying the essence of governance in ritual dynamics with mace, sceptre, fasces or vajra?
Global-Local dynamic: mace-based governance challenged by a feather?
Imagining local-global connectivity through innovative mace and vajra design
Imagining a mnemonic device of requisite higher dimensionality

This paper proposes reflexive mitigation as an ecologically effective insurance system response to dangerous anthropogenic climate change. Reflexive mitigation is an adaptive approach to mitigating climate change recognizing (1) atmospheric CO2e concentrations consistent with Earth system stability will vary over time in response to changes in the Earth system and the global economy, and in the relationship between them; and (2) relationships between the Earth system, the economy and the insurance system are evolving, and therefore understanding of them is necessarily incomplete. The paper presents a complex adaptive systems approach to anthropogenic climate change and demonstrates that the Earth system, the global economy and the insurance system are connected social–ecological systems. Current insurance system responses to anthropogenic climate change are generally adaptive and weakly mitigative rather than strongly mitigative. The paper argues successful insurance system adaptation to anthropogenic climate change depends on returning the climate to a stable, familiar and relatively predictable state: effective mitigation is therefore a necessary precondition for successful longer-term insurance system adaptation.

An effective and efficient stewardship of natural resources requires consistency across all decision-informing approaches and components involved, i.e., managerial, governmental, political, and legal. To achieve this consistency, these elements must be aligned under an overarching management goal that is consistent with current and well-accepted knowledge. In this article, we investigate the adoption by the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of an environmental resilience-centered system that manages for resilience of marine ecological resources and its associated social elements. Although the framework is generally tailored for this Bureau, it could also be adapted to other federal or non-federal organizations. This paper presents a dynamic framework that regards change as an inherent element of the socio-ecological system in which management structures, e.g., federal agencies, are embedded. The overall functioning of the management framework being considered seeks to mimic and a...