Abstract :
Society faces a number of ongoing and seemingly intractable problems – poverty, homelessness, environmental degradation, and disabilities among others – which governments and NGOs struggle to address. When efforts fail, it could be said that the system is caught in a trap, unable to respond to “chronic disasters” (Erikson, 1994) or immediate crises. On the other hand, social innovation, generally associated with creative initiatives on the part on one or many individuals, can at times transform such trapped systems. How and why does this happen? This abstract draws on a framework developed by a group of interdisciplinary scholars known as the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org). This group, initially led and created by C.S Holling focuses on linked social and ecological resilience, defined as follows: Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future.
