My Sellberg, Stockholm Resilience Centre
July 2014
“Nobody really takes responsibility for these large, global issues in a municipality”, said Lars Wiklund, strategic environmental planner in Eskilstuna municipality, referring to risks related to climate change, peak oil and global financial crisis. This was one of the main reasons why the municipality decided to do a resilience assessment and look deeper into how these potential global crises could impact the local level. Lars Wiklund and his colleague Lars-Erik Dahlin contacted the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2011 to explore how resilience thinking might inform their municipal planning. Now, three years on, we are in the middle of a participatory resilience assessment process and I have a lot to both reflect on and look forward to.
First, something short about the municipality. Until the 1970’s, Eskilstuna was a center for the metal industry but is now reinventing itself, and emphasizing sustainable development in the process. The municipality has about 100 000 inhabitants and is situated 100 km inland from Stockholm.
The resilience assessment process began by involving students in a PhD-course about resilience assessment that used Eskilstuna as a pilot study. This was followed by an internal two-day workshop at the municipality that involved learning about key concepts and conducting a condensed version of resilience assessment, emphasizing professional development for civil servants. Two follow-up workshops this year provided an opportunity to focus on one of the key issues of concern – local food security. At the first food workshop, we gathered actors representing local to national levels, to scope the important issues around food and the municipality’s role in planning for long-term food security. At the second food workshop we started the actual resilience assessment together with a group of mainly civil servants, but also local farmers, and researchers.
Outcomes
To date, one of the main successes of this process has been the development of an effective transdisciplinary planning team that designed and facilitated the workshops. The team consists of two planners from Eskiltuna who initiated the process, as well as a research communicator, Louise Hård af Segerstad, and myself, My Sellberg, as a researcher. Another researcher, Cathy Wilkinson was a core member of the team during the initial start-up phase. The success of this team lies in the inclusion of both science and practice perspectives, the co-ownership of the process, and trust, which has laid a foundation for a great co-learning process.
Another success lies in the “bridge-building” capacity of the resilience assessment framework. From the very beginning the framework has made both sustainability planners and crisis management officials feel at home talking about their system with a common language. The framing around resilience of the food system has also helped bring together civil servants interested in sustainable development with farmers interested in boosting local business under the same roof.
Opportunities & Challenges
Even though this is an ongoing process, we have already identified several useful outcomes, as well as challenges. First of all, the process has inspired a municipal focus on food security, which is not formally under their mandate. The municipality has neither sole power nor complete knowledge of food production or consumption within its geographical area. Doing the resilience assessment as a participatory process is a rather pragmatic choice in this case, since it has helped with understanding the system dynamics better and with building capacity to implement interventions. Although there are clear differences of opinion among the actors involved, a common picture of the goal is crystallizing. There is emerging potential for collaborative projects further on, for example around strengthening the local food market.
Secondly, the process has created an important space for dialogue. This can seem trivial, but a lot happens just by creating a space where people with different knowledge and perspectives can discuss a common issue of concern. Seemingly, most of the learning in the room is a result of that dialogue, which helps participants to better understand their role in the bigger picture. Knowing that this dialogue is so essential, a challenge remains to get all the people that have different important pieces of knowledge involved in the process.
The third outcome has been a broadening in the ways of thinking to include a deeper understanding of the dynamics of complex systems. Knowing about nonlinear change and complex systems pushes the planners and everyone involved to consider uncertainty to a larger extent. In our process, this learning mostly happened at the first workshop, rather than at the later workshops. This was probably in part because the participants at the first workshop knew each other better, had high levels of formal education, and the workshop itself included more practical exercises around system dynamics. There is definitely a pedagogical challenge in communicating resilience thinking, since the preferred approach could differ a lot depending on participant’s existing knowledge and beliefs. I think we could have made greater use of exercises and games that elicit the participants’ own knowledge and experience of complex systems. We also found a trade-off in time spent on learning the way of thinking, versus doing the actual assessment exercises.
Two final reflections I would like to share from this process are firstly, that a participatory resilience assessment process, compared to a desk-top assessment by experts, can build general resilience within the system or place of interest both by fostering systems understanding among participants, as well as by creating new social networks. Secondly, bridging the science-policy divide through resilience assessment requires being conscious of the political context. The intentions and agendas of the people who drive the process will shape the entire framing of the assessment. It needs to be acknowledged that resilience assessment could be used in a conservative manner that reinforces the current regime, even when that regime is not sustainable in the long-term. In our case, organizers from the municipality ultimately aspire for a transition to a society that is more resilient to global changes and so far, the resilience assessment seems to be a useful tool in supporting that aspiration.
Location: Eskilstuna, Sweden
System Type: Urban
Contact: My Sellberg
Organization: Stockholm Resilience Center
Collaboratoring Institutions: Municipality of Eskilstuna
Project Dates: 2011-2015
Keywords: Municipal planning; participatory approach; interdisciplinary; food security
