Limits to Resilience Framing

Natural resource management issues often are framed as an effort to promote resilience to changing conditions, with resilience defined as "the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure" (Walker and Salt, 2006). Climate change, and the increased human uses it will enable, will dramatically increase stresses on natural resources within the arctic system. This paper will address the degree to which resilience framing affects the management of arctic natural resources in a changing climate. The conclusion is that resilience framing leaves many questions unanswered, and may narrow thinking and lead to erroneous assumptions about what is desirable or achievable. The paper will draw on previous work on framing natural resource management for climate resilience and apply it to the special challenges posed by climate change in the Arctic.

Those involved in resource decisions know that options are limited by decisions made early in the process. The way an issue is framed will affect the way a problem is understood, the values and interests included, the experts consulted, the information considered, and the alternatives considered. Stakeholders and framing are interactive. The stakeholders invited to participate affect the way issues are framed, and early framing itself will influence the choices of stakeholders involved. Physical changes in the arctic system will expand the group of stakeholders claiming an interest in management decisions, forcing resource managers to rethink who should be invited into planning processes and for what purposes.

Resilience framing focuses attention on maintaining current systems. Changes expected to arctic systems may require managers to consider when and why to relinquish current systems, how to shape the nature of the change, and how to ease transitions to reduce the adverse impacts to both natural systems and the humans who depend on them. Managers may need to learn how to bolster resilience to economic and political as well as to climatic shocks. Understanding the limits to resilience framing will help managers decide what resources to protect and how to make management decisions in response to the challenges of climate change.