Reconciling Risk, Resilience, and Sustainability: Learning from Narratives

The continuing unsustainable pattern of human behavior creates enormous risks of increasingly frequent and severe disasters impacting the complex social-ecological-economic-technical system (SES) in which all life on Earth is embedded. This chapter outlines key concepts of complex systems as the foundation for understanding resilience, sustainability, and acute or chronic disruptive stressors of the SES. The relationship between resilience and sustainability has the potential for synergies or tradeoffs, depending on normative judgements particular to the cultures and contexts in which the risks may manifest. Important insights into the normative landscape in co-located or online communities can be gained by collecting and analyzing their narratives of imagined futures and social identities, which is one of the key research areas of the international Knowledge, Learning, and Societal Change Alliance (KLASICA).