DESIGNING PROJECTS IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING WORLD

1.3 WHAT IS RAPTA?
BOX A
Key Terms and concepts*
There is a Glossary and key concepts section
in Appendix B. We present some fundamental
concepts here, consistent with the ecological
resilience literature.
• Resilience is the capacity of a social–ecological
system to absorb shocks and trends (e. g. like
drought) and to reorganise so as to retain the
same functions, structure, and feedbacks (i.e. the
same identity). Resilience is neither good nor bad
– a system can be in an undesirable state yet still
be resilient to shocks, e.g. a grassland that has
been invaded by unpalatable shrubs.
• Adaptation refers to the process of change that
enables a system to maintain its identity, so that
it is better able to cope with trends and shocks,
or to reduce vulnerability to disturbance.
• Transformation is a shift from the current system
to a substantively new and different one. For example,
the transformation of a cropping system
to an agro-pastoral system.
• Adaptation and transformation may be planned
(intentional) or unplanned (autonomous), wanted
or unwanted, imposed by a government,
community-led, or the result of a government-community
partnership. It may happen at
community-wide scale, or one household at a
time. RAPTA helps to design interventions which
are intentional adaptations and transformations.
• Changes that adapt or transform a system can
be fast (shocks) or slow (trends), or a combination
of both. A controlling variable may change
in a slow, predictable way (e.g. such as a rising
groundwater table), but the impacts of that
change may not be smooth and can exhibit
threshold effects. For example, once saline
groundwater rises to within a certain distance
of the surface, capillary action draws it to the
surface creating saline topsoil where trees and
plants struggle to survive even if the water table
falls again. In this case the controlling variable
(groundwater level) changes smoothly,
but the rapid change in soil condition causes
a sudden, often irreversible, shock to land use.
• It’s all a matter of scale, in time and space. Big
changes such as a decline in soil fertility, or a rise
in greenhouse gases, may be called “trends”
when viewed against the time frame of the decisions
of a person, or a government. However,
over longer timescales they can be viewed as
“shocks”. Likewise, a sequence of actions which
are labelled “incremental adaptation” over the
shorter term, may be seen as transformational
over the longer term. Sometimes, in order to
maintain the same system at one scale, transformations
may have to occur at a finer scale. For
example, if a river basin is to continue to supply
irrigation water and the overall amount of rainfall
is reducing due to climate change, some irrigation
areas within that river basin may have to be
closed down (i.e. transformed to dryland agriculture),
in order to maintain an irrigation industry at
the river basin scale.
*Distilled from many sources in the social-ecological
resilience literature, including Walker, BH &
Salt, D 2012. Resilience Practice: Building capacity
to absorb disturbance and maintain function,
Island Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
Introduction to RAPTA 19