General Interest

Resilience Thinking and Mangroves in Indonesia

Two years ago I brought over to Jogyakarta a copy of Walker and Salt’s “Resilience Thinking” , which had just been released in Australia. The book was enthusiastically copied and circulated around environmentalist circles (in fact, I recently saw a copy in the library of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation in Bali). One of the readers who came across the book was Ben Brown, formerly the director of Mangrove Action Project Indonesia. Just prior to encountering the book, Ben had been researching mangrove ecosystems and mangrove management in Indonesia, and was so taken with resilience thinking as a conceptual framework that he incorporated it into an awesome report that he wrote on mangroves as resilient ecosystems.

As Ben relates in the Foreword to the report,

“One year after the 2006 Yogyakarta Earthquake, I found myself poking around a friend’s house in Bantul, one of the regions most devastated by the quake. Approximately 200 of the 250 houses in his village were either destroyed or properly damaged. Most of the houses, one year after the fact, had been rebuilt, do to the fund-raising prowess of an ex-pat who runs Yogyakarta’s largest handicraft export business, and has resided in the same village for nearly a decade. Before this substantial aid found its way to the village, truckloads of community volunteers had already come pouring down from the Central Javanese highlands, laden with bamboo and free or cheap labor, to help in reconstruction.

I had not yet heard much of the term resilience, but seemingly, social systems in Yogyakarta (local community, government, non-government, and international) were by and large up to the task of rebuilding, at least to a greater extent than the 2004 tsunami disaster in Aceh. At any rate, this is not a paper on the resilience of disaster stricken communities, but my introduction to resilience thinking came during this time period. While at my friend’s house, I came across an unassuming looking paperback with the succinct title “Resilience Thinking.” What immediately caught my eye, was the photograph on the cover depicting a solitary, four-leaved mangrove seedling (Ceriops tagal), poking up from an uplifted coral head. By chance, I had just returned a week before from a mangrove restoration assessment on Simeulue Island, Aceh (see case study #2), from 6 sites which had undergone tectonic uplift of around 1 meter. I had in my, literally one hundred of my own photos identical to the one gracing the cover of “Resilience Thinking.” I borrowed the book, read it cover to cover, made eight copies, and now am re-borrowing (haven given away all eight copies) the book as a reference for this writing.

Resilience thinking is really nothing new (the description of the adaptive cycle in “Resilience Thinking” mirrors the ancient Chinese cycle of the five elements), but the authors, David Salt and Brian Walker, have mapped out the theory behind resilience thinking in such a way that it resonates with readers. It certainly resonated with me, at once framing my past decade of work in SE Asia in the realm of community based mangrove management, conservation and restoration, as well as providing a frame-work for future management actions. In the first chapter, the authors express their hope that readers will start asking questions about the systems with which they work. This challenge came at a time when the IUCN had contracted us at Mangrove Action Project – Indonesia, to produce media on mangroves for larger-scale distribution.

… I am not a true mangrover, perhaps more of an associate of mangroves. The best that can be said for myself and the staff of Mangrove Action Project in Indonesia is that we are very close to the fisher-folk with whom we work, and we probably have a better understanding of rural coastal community dynamics in Indonesia than most. …What we are attempting with this paper is the application of a wonderful way of thinking (resilience), to a system very dear to us (mangroves). Our hope is that at least a few readers will take up the challenge to learn more about resilience thinking and to apply it to current mangrove management efforts in their own regions.”

Ben made some interesting comments about resilience as a holistic, integrative paradigm. He says, “When we first heard about resilience thinking, we were stoked. The concepts were immediately familiar to us: to all of us working in mangroves, mangroves are a textbook example of a resilient ecosystem. What the book managed to do was make the concept of resilience clear and accessible. And it becomes a framework that allows you to manage the ecosystem for both the social and ecological paradigm: it gives you a methodology for putting the two together. It gives you an integrative scientific model, in which the social side becomes social science, instead of social work or development, which wasn’t thought of scientifically so much.” It was fascinating for me to hear, coming from a university course focusing on interdisciplinary human-environment problems; being a humanities student in the Faculty of Science. These kind of holistic approaches make sense to me, but there’s always the concern of how useful they are in practice. It’s great to see someone in the field attracted to these ideas in a similar way, and applying them.

The paper was published by IUCN (the World Conservation Union) and was read by mangrove researchers in Sri Lanka, Phillipines and Thailand; copies were also distributed to various government agencies in Indonesia. As Ben explains, much of the report aimed to present concepts of resilience thinking for dissemination in policy circles which might otherwise not have the opportunity to engage with these ideas:

“This paper intends to present the precepts of “Resilience Thinking” as they relate to mangrove management in Indonesia. The paper’s only real design is to provide mangrove managers with basic information on resilience, so that they may begin to think of mangrove forests under their jurisdiction as socio-ecological systems and begin to perceive management actions based on their ability to maintain or increase the resilience of the mangrove forest. Before going into the specifics of resilience and mangroves, we need a basic understanding of the concept of resilience as described by David Salt and Brian Walker, authors of “Resilience Thinking.” As opposed to paraphrasing the authors (and misconstruing their connotations), many of the key concepts on resilience are taking verbatim from the book “Resilience Thinking” and the Resilience Alliance website, not with the intent to plagiarize, but because so many mangrove managers in Indonesia will not be able to access the original, and also so that translation from English to Indonesia takes place with as little distortion as possible. Again, the main emphasis of this paper is to make a new mode of thinking accessible managers who have limited access to written materials.”

Download: “Resilience Thinking Applied to the Mangroves of Indonesia“, Ben Brown, IUCN & Mangrove Action Project, Yogyakarta, INDONESIA, 2007.

(sorry about the monster file size, I’ll upload a smaller file soon)

© 2008 The Transdisciplinary Imagination.