Panarchy, ontological and epistemological phenomena, and the Plague

Abstract

Building resilience to major economic, social, and ecological crises such as armed conflict and natural disasters is seen as critical to maintaining system integrity. Although studies of system survival can be used to gauge whether or not social systems are resilient, this can only be conducted in retrospect. Contemporary measures of resilience rely on proxy measures that one can argue build capacity for resilience, but are not direct proxies for resilience itself, except in highly subscribed conditions. This leads us to our key research questions: Can the resilience of a system be measured contemporaneously by those within a social system? What can we learn from past efforts to understand the resilience of social systems by those living through their transformations? To answer these we examine Europe in the second half of the 14th century, during the outbreak and spread of the Plague through the continent. Through an examination of academic research relying on contemporary accounts during this period, we examine the indicators Europeans used at the time to understand changes in their social-ecological systems. We find a time lag between quantitative indicators of system resilience and the systemic shocks introduced by the Plague. However, narratives from the time suggest that those who experienced the epidemic were trying to develop personal understandings of the social changes around them and collective understandings of how to respond to these crises, both in advance of collecting easily comparable data that could be used for broader administrative purposes. The progression from individual narratives, to common understandings, and finally to comparable data is likely a common process that occurs as those within a social-ecological system make sense of a shift of the system from one arrangement to another.

Keywords

• complexity
• measurement
• narrative
• resilience