9. When resilience fails – Interdisciplinary perspectives on resilience and natural disasters Chair: Lance Gunderson, Dept of Environmental Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Panel members: Michel van Eeten, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, The Netherlands P.H. Longstaff , S.I. Newhouse Communications Center, Syracuse University, USA Ann S. Masten, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA R.A. Boin, Department of Public Administration, Leiden University , The Netherlands and Stephenson Disaster Management Institute, Louisiana State University, USA Description: Introduction Across the planet, natural disasters are severely impacting individual and collective societies. Over time, humans develop individually and collectively, adapt and learn how to deal with these events. Yet, the abrupt and often unpredictable dynamics associated with these events has led to greater uncertainty in spite of technological and scientific advances. At the same time, the increasing human population and development have generated more vulnerability of life and property to these events (Bohannan 2005) and the potential loss of ecosystem goods and services (MEA 2005). The roots of the word “disaster” literally means bad star, suggesting an extra-planetary origin of these events, but perhaps better describing the large uncertainties associated with them. Large-scale disasters include those that have been experienced, such as outbreaks of disease, including influenza (Barry 2004) AIDS, or Hanta Virus; recurring tsunamis (Adger et al. 2005), tropical cyclones, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Kates et al., 2006) or global climate change (Steffen et al, 2004), to name but a few. The class of problems presented by natural disasters historically have been addressed through approaches that attempt to improve methods for prediction, advance preparations (including buffering or dampening the impacts of disasters) and efficiencies of recovery after the disturbance. Humans, organizations, social systems, and ecosystems all develop; that is, they change over time in form and function such that they grow, mature, die, and change in interesting ways characteristic of the species or type of organization or ecosystem, as shaped by cultural and biological evolution. Economies and societies also develop and their resources, vulnerabilities, responses, and therefore resilience will reflect their development. Developing systems have sensitive periods when their stability and flexibility changes, along with vulnerabilities and opportunities pertinent to surviving a major threat. Consequently, the same strategies to promote resilience to future surprises will not work for systems in different stages of development and planning for resilience must include developmental perspectives. Resilience fails when the system loses its capacity to absorb disturbance or undergo change while still retaining essentially the same identity, functions, structures, and feedbacks. For example, the individual dies or the group reorganizes but looks nothing like it did before. This happens when the danger is “too novel, too fast, or too abundant” (Allen, 2001) That is, the system does not have response capabilities that are diverse enough, it cannot marshal these responses quickly enough, or the danger is so forceful that all responses are overwhelmed. The danger may become too forceful if the system has been weakened by previous dangers and has not had time to recover. The system may also fail if those managing it impose a response that is not consistent with the local system ’s own trajectory or path dependence, such as the growth patterns of a city (Makse et al, 1995) or the attempted containment of fire ants Zettler et al., 2001). Systems made up of many units with different histories and different local resources, are likely to have different strategies for developing and maintaining resilience. We propose to conduct a two-hour session to compare and contrast disciplinary views of resilience in complex, developing systems in the context of natural disasters. We propose to discuss issues such as how activities and processes during development phases either build or erode resilience, other factors that lead to system collapse. The participants are listed below and include scholars on resilience in organizational, communication and business systems (Pat Longstaff), human development (Ann Masten), public disaster management (Arjen Boin) and ecological/resource management systems (Michel van Eeten and Lance Gunderson. We will present perspectives and have a panel discussion on useful similarities and differences in resilience theories across disciplines. All of the participants have been engaged for the past year discussing interdisciplinary perspectives on resilience. Three were linked in a US National Science Foundation project (P. Longstaff, PI) that held a series of workshops that highlighted different perspectives on resilience and natural disasters.