What is Resilience?

Problematizing and positioning the concept for decentralised infrastructure research

Kelsie Nabben,
March 2022

This piece explores the concept of resilience. Digital technologies are infrastructures that support human activity. The concept of resilience has applicability in the disciplines of software engineering, civil engineering, and community development. It has also garnered interest in relation to organisational resilience in “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (DAOs).[1] In this piece, I ask the research question: ‘what lens of resilience is relevant to the ethnography of decentralised digital infrastructures, such as public blockchains. I argue that a sociotechnical resilience approach is fitting to assess both social and technical adaptability, change, consistency, and transformation in response to threat or crisis. This excerpt forms part of my methodological positioning for broader research projects.

Image 1: “Resilience”. Courtesy of Alex Shute @faithgiant, via Unsplash

Resilience – origins and definitions

Resilience is a multi-disciplinary and widely interpretable term. Originating in mathematical observations of ecosystem dynamics, the concept of resilience is adopted in the study of ecology, social systems including individual human psychology, communities, organizations, and cities, information technology, and engineering.[2]

Resilience is a concept originally proposed to understand the dynamics of social-ecological systems.[3] Ecological economist C.S. Holling uses the language of communications and cybernetics to re-think popular notions of resilience as relations in ecosystems. Holling proposes that a “stability view” of systems emphasizes the quantitative study of the maintenance and constancy in behaviour of a systems performance in relation to system goals, whereas a “resilience view” emphasizes the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes and still persist. Analysing relationships within a system requires qualitative inquiry.[4] The resilience approach emphasizes nonlinear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales.[5]

The literature on social-ecological resilience defines resilience as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change with the aim of the aim of being persistent or robust against disturbance.[6] Perturbations to a system also create opportunities for new trajectories, via the recombination or evolution of structures and processes and renewal of the system.

Resilience can be further understood in an ecological paradigm as adaptability and transformability of both stakeholders and the system itself in response to perturbations. Resilience affords a system with adaptivity. Adaptability is the capacity of actors in a system influence resilience.[7] Adaptive capacity is the capability of the system to adjust dynamically, between states of maintenance and change,[8] whilst transformability is the capacity of a system to adapt and self-organise to create a fundamentally new system in response to ecological, economic, or social conditions.[9]

Other lenses through which to understand and apply resilience

Resilience is sometimes understood in relation to disaster, as “a potentially traumatic event that is collectively experienced, has an acute onset, and is time delimited; disasters may be attributed to natural, technological, or human causes.”[10]

Another related concept to resilience by which to inquire of it is the notion of vulnerability. Hommels, et. al. define “vulnerabilities” as emergent and relational properties that pervade everyday life and are firmly embedded in the context in which they emerge.[11] Vulnerabilities can include environmental factors (“livelihood” vulnerabilities), power structures, or other properties that are co-produced between technical and social factors in technological cultures.

Vulnerabilities can also co-exist, compete, and intertwine in multiplicity. Furthermore, once vulnerabilities are identified, they can be “governed” to improve adaptive capacity through various mechanisms including values systems, community relations, knowledge, and the rules or functions of technology.[12] Holling defines system sustainability as “the capacity to create, test, and maintain adaptive capability”.[13] In pursuit of getting as close to this objective as possible, vulnerabilities and resilience interplay across micro, meso, and macro scales of a system in relation to adaptive capacity.[14]As such, the concept of resilience has since been applied to describe the adaptive capacities of individuals,[15] communities,[16] and larger societies.[17]

Ecological definitions and uses of the concept of resilience have evolved into community and individual ones.

From a sociological perspective, community resilience is a process of change and continuity in response to crisis that leads to linking adaptive capacities after a disturbance or adversity, for frameworks of understanding to build stronger communities. [18] Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities that communities must focus on to build collective resilience and reduce risk: Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence—that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. This requires a process linking a set of adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation after a disturbance. Thus, community resilience emerges from a set of networked and relational adaptive capacities. [19] These networked capacities arise within a community from social and technical infrastructures, including network tooling, collective action, and decision making competencies.

Criticisms of resilience

Resilience as a concept has also been criticised for being problematic, ambiguous, and not useful.[20] The term “resilience” has been imported and “infiltrated” numerous disciplinary areas. For example, it has been applied in world politics and policy arenas to justify political agendas, such as the need for resilience in critical infrastructure against the threat of terrorism or foreign attack.[21] This is lamented by some, who argue that “resilience” is a justification for particular forms of neoliberal markets and governance, which in turn formulate a political economy of financialization and resource extractivism.[22] Interpretations of resilience are reflected in governance and infrastructure. Infrastructure then shapes social outcomes through the physical organisation of people and communities and social institutions of coordination. 

Decentralised technologies and resilience

In regards to distributed computing architectures, resilience was the goal sought by Paul Baran when developing distributed communications infrastructure against the threat of war in the 1960s.[23] It was then sought through cryptographic security of data and privacy through the work of public key cryptographers in the 1970s and 1980s.[24] Resilience then became a political objective, for autonomy from state control or intervention under the cypherpunks in the 1990s.[25] The explicit overlay of political ambition to decentralised technologies introduces challenging dynamics when trying to establish “decentralised” governance, including the resilience of people in the system in relation to power, ownership, governance rights, and politics, as well the resilience of the technological infrastructure itself, such as cybersecurity.[26]

A research group within a major decentralised protocol company called “Protocol Labs” defines a resilient network or system as “one that is fundamentally uncompromised by an isolated failure or network split. The system is malleable, adaptable to different conditions, and capable of evolving to meet new requirements over time”.[27] Whilst this is a relevant technical definition, cryptoeconomic systems have been identified as both social and technical, co-constructive assemblages.[28]

Decentralised digital infrastructures as socio-technical systems

Decentralised systems are digital infrastructures. Digital infrastructures are described as heterogenous ecologies, composed of connected social and technical components, including hardware, information, software applications, standards, and people.[29]

A socio-technical definition of resilience is proposed by Amir and Tantri as “adaptability and transformability of a socio-technical system in response to threat or crisis”.[30] In other words, resilience is found in the adaptive capacity of a system, afforded by both social and technical adaptations and transformations across multiple scales of the system.[31] Resilience is the ongoing ability of a multi-agent system to function, towards stated objectives.

Much of my research on decentralised technologies as sociotechnical systems adopts a socio-technical definition of resilience as “adaptability and transformability of a system in response to crisis” of both people and tools as a relational system.[32] As such, I investigate resilience in terms of both the social and technical dynamics of decentralised technologies, at multiple scales.[33]

Sociologists Edwards, et. al. argue that the history of most large-scale infrastructures have two crucial moments in which they are most likely to fail. These are a “gateway moment” - when technical, political, legal, and social innovations link previously separate systems to form far more powerful, far-reaching networks, and the recurring issue of adjustment in which infrastructures “adapt to, reshape, or even internalize elements of their environment in the process of growth and entrenchment”.[34] Thus, when infrastructures cannot link with other systems, or adapt to grow, change, and consolidate in response to their environment, they cannot be considered resilient. “A principal reason most systems fail is that these critical moments are difficult to anticipate or plan for, and rarely lend themselves to deliberate design”.[35] This attribute of adaptivity is perhaps one of the most useful attributes to investigate to determine the resilience of a socio-technical system.

Studying information infrastructures

"What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a 'thing.' "— states cybernetician Gregory Bateson, as quoted by infrastructure studies ethnographer, Susan Leigh Star.[36]

Ethnography allows for the investigation of non-documented, hidden, relational aspects of infrastructure. When dealing with information infrastructures, “we need to look to the whole array of organizational forms, practices, and institutions that accompany, make possible, and inflect the development of new technology, their related practices, and their distributions”.[37] Digital infrastructures are both the material artefacts constructed by people; and the work performed by the user; and a record of activities as the information itself collects and stores information.[38] The material world of things and the social world of humans are entangled by dependences that create both potentials and entrapments.[39] Thus, resilience in digital infrastructure requires an inspection of both social and technical dynamics.

The study of infrastructures requires the qualitative practice of uncovering the hidden “master narratives” and invisible “hidden work” in the processes of creators to uncover forms of social change that occur through “every conceivable form of variation in practice, culture, and norm” embedded in information infrastructure.[40]

Ethnography has been used by a number of prominent researchers in the study of resilience in systems.[41]

Conclusion

This piece has problematised the concept of resilience and positioned its usefulness and limitations in relation to my own ethnographic research on decentralised, digital infrastructures.

Ethnographer Annette Markham argues that “If we can recognize how frames like these function to construct the parameters of our everyday social experiences, we gain leverage in critically examining how “scientific inquiry” is being delimited within this framework”.[42]

The study of resilience in decentralized infrastructure links to the broader frame of adaptivity and persistence social organisation, governance, and coordination. By investigating resilience as adaptability of both technology and people, I’m inquiring into the capabilities, limitations, and social outcomes of decentralised technologies. Ethnography then, is a suitable methodological approach compliment engineering approaches that study the resilience of technological systems, to also understand the communities, cultures, and motivations that design, build, and use these tools, and the transformative affordances and limitations of these dynamic human-machine ensembles in action.

Acknowledgements: With thanks to Jessica Zartler from BlockScience for editorial feedback.

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References:

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