hide
Free keywords:
Environmental history, Historical resilience, Societal resilience,
Socio-economic inequality
Abstract:
How environmental stress affected past societies is an area of increasing relevance for contemporary planning and policy concerns. The paper below examines a series of case studies that demonstrate that short-term strategies that sustain a state or a specific bundle of vested interests did not necessarily promote longer-term societal resilience and often increased structural pressures leading to systemic crisis. Some societies or states possessed sufficient structural flexibility to overcome very serious short-term challenges without further exacerbating existing inequalities. But even where efforts were made consciously to assist the entire community the outcome often generated unpredictable changes with negative longer-term impacts. Greater degrees of baseline socio-economic inequality at the outset of a crisis are associated with less resilience in the system as a whole, a more uneven distribution of the resilience burden, and an increased risk of post-solution breakdown of a given social order. The historical case studies therefore indicate that future policy planners must consider structural socio-economic imbalances when designing and implementing responses to environmental challenges.
