Elinor Ostrom: Capacity to Respond to Change
Barcelona climate news has me thinking about wicked problems and clumsy solutions.
Here's Elinor Ostrom, from an interview by Joe Cone of the Oregon Sea Grant project, Communicating Climate Change (mp3).
Joe Cone: [I]s planning to attempt to be resilient a worthwhile response from managers or government?
E. Ostrom: Yes, so long as people recognize how complex it is and don’t think it’s possible just to have a nice little neat optimal plan.
Joe Cone: Let’s talk about that.
E. Ostrom: Recognizing that this is something that must be done at multiple levels, so what I am concerned about is a lot of people think that the only way to cope with global change is international agreements. And if we sit around and wait for the national leaders of our respective countries to come to an agreement and operationalize it and make it effective, then people along the coast are going to lose their coasts. So, we must be thinking of diverse ways that we can increase the capacity to respond to external change. We can just call it capacity to respond to change.
We don’t need to use the fancy name “resilience.” How do we cope with change? And, the tragedy of Katrina was that three years before that hurricane, there had been a very well specified article showing that among the kinds of storms we could be facing in the next five years, was a storm like Katrina that would have devastating impacts on the coastal area. That was not predicted that it would occur, but it was predicted that it could well occur and nobody took it seriously. And so Katrina showed that federal, state and local authorities in New Orleans were not resilient and did not have an effective plan, and it was a disaster. And I think maybe that experience is making a lot more people think, well, we’d better be a little bit more self-conscious that these things could happen.
You have a health threat of some kind of release of new bugs. And, the people who need to be involved in that, coping with that threat, are different than a flood. So we need to be thinking about the diversity of things that could happen with global change. Part of global change involves globalization, and people traveling all over the world and bringing strange things back with them.
(Hat tip: P+T)
