Abstract
The article makes a case for the integration of resilience thinking in the debate on rural human settlements in the regional planning. It observes the numerous definitions of resilience within different research traditions, disciplines and fields, such as sociology, psychology, medicine, engineering, economics, ecology and political science have affected the decision-making processes in different human settlements across the globe. The dynamics of integrating resilience theory and practice into rural settlement planning and implications for sustainable development are little understood. The paper suggests the broadening of resilience drawing on diverse perspectives that appeal to wide ranging interdisciplinary experiences. Using the multi-case study approach, the article suggests how ideas of resilience can be translated into practice and how practices of resilience can be theorised in the context of the regional planning in Zimbabwe. Undoubtedly, an integrated framework for the development country’s space economy should accommodate a wide range of concepts, strategies and models of resilience together with the underpinning policy implementation modalities.
Resilience has a long history. However, it only emerged as a public policy debate post-2000 becoming a more widely adopted concept dominating policies and projects. The environmental challenges that human settlements continue to face manifest themselves in different forms making resilience an evolving concept (Leichenko 2011; Patel et al. 2017; Salinas Rodriguez et al. 2014; Serre et al. 2012). Diverse definitions of resilience exist within different research traditions and disciplines including sociology, psychology, medicine, engineering, economics, ecology and political science (Hutter et al. 2013; Wiig and Fahlbruch 2019). This diversity has affected decision-making in different human settlements across the globe. In practice, resilience has tended to be characterised by trade-offs between multiple and, at times, competing objectives (Ernstson et al. 2010). Consequently, managers, planners and regulatory practitioners have called for conceptual tools to help them develop risk management strategies, establish appropriate compromises and justify their decisions in the contested policy settings (Jha et al. 2013; Sharifi 2016; Somers 2009).
A systems resilience perspective defines how the interrelationships of the elements a system retains its functionality in the context of a storm by adapting to the changes in the situation (Nuryanti et al. 2017). Depending on the nature and the extent of its operational boundaries, a system can constitute smaller systems that are interacting with other systems beyond its boundaries. As a case in point, a family is a sub-system comprising members that can interact with members of other families constituting a community of families representing a wider system. Resilience means that the functions of a system remain robust in a crisis situation, where the quality of its resilience is a product of the functional relationships of the subsystems.
The concept of a human settlement is both social and physical. The human settlement is a place where people live (Živkovic 2019). The human settlement comes in many forms and can be permanent and temporary, rural and urban, mobile and sedentary, disseminated and agglomerated. Settlements are therefore, given meaning by three interrelated concepts, namely, functions; population sustaining itself from functions and also morphology; the physical manifestation of the population sustaining itself from functions in a particular locale (Musvoto 2014). An understanding of the human settlement typology would be incomplete without a consideration of their geographic location and distribution. Settlements are defined by their relative location within and adjacent to urban cores and their economic divisions: whether located in the core of cities; on their fringe or periphery, or at some distance from cities (Kilian et al. 2005). The other factor, that is used to differentiate human settlements, is population size. The exact size may vary from country to country; to be classified as ‘urban’. For example, in Denmark, a settlement needs only 250 people, compared to Greece, where ‘urban’ is defined as a settlement of 10,000 or more (Khullar 2016).
Climate change is projected to have profound impacts on Zimbabwe, including heightened water stress, increased incidence of drought, declines in crop and livestock productivity, change in wildlife ranges, an increase in wildfire incidents and the possible expansion of malaria zones (Jiri et al. 2017). Resilience practices have improved the capacity of rural communities to adapt to the climate change through the promotion of climate-smart agriculture practices, improvements in smallholder farmer’s access to markets and improving stakeholders’ capacities for participatory planning at the district level (Makate 2019; Mutenje et al. 2019). Sustainable development initiatives in Zimbabwe have been characterised by the weak implementation and the low impact on the ground. The institutional and infrastructural challenges observed in the case of rural Zimbabwe were shown to execrate vulnerability to the climate change and inhibit the realisation of AU Agenda 2063 as they restrict access to the very natural capital needed by communities to improve socio-economic wellbeing and reduce vulnerability (Dube et al. 2018).
This article suggests a conceptual broadening of resilience that can corroborate a variety of diverse perspectives that draw on the practical experiences in the different disciplines. An understanding of how ideas of resilience can be translated into practice and how practices of resilience can, in turn be theorised and explained is the major concern of the paper. Thus, the article discusses how the resilience theory can be integrated into the planning and the development of rural human settlements. Resilience is largely applied in the disaster research (Cutter et al. 2008; Harris et al. 2010; Jackson 2007; Kuhlicke 2013). The paper attempts to explain resilience as a resilience thinking with a development perspective. It seeks to explain this core debate supported by the new developmental perspective and criticisms.
Resilience Thinking: A Review
Resilience is a recent topic in policy and environmental planning and management research. There appears to be many aspects that explain why planners seem to be failing to put the concept into practice. The article adopts the definition of resilience by Folke et al. (2010, 1) that is ‘… the capacity of a [socio-ecological system] SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds’. Resilience thinking thus has three pillars: resilience, adaptability and transformability. The following paragraphs intend to provide evolutionary insights to the subject.
Resilience has gained current in central organising metaphor for the policy-making process including aspects of national security and emergency preparedness (Cutter et al. 2008; Thiruchelvam et al. 2018). Political prioritisation of the safety and security of communities against an array of perceived hazards and threats, including terrorism, disease pandemic and global warming-related flooding underpin resilience thinking (Coaffee 2013). Overall, resilience has its roots in the study of adversity and people’s adjustment to it (Wiig and Fahlbruch 2019). Complex adaptive systems and resilience show how organisations adapt to the challenges they face, particularly in relation to the social and the technological complexity.
Some have considered the diversity of conceptualisations on resilience a weakness of the traditional approach giving rise to growing calls for a coherent integrative theoretical framework of resilience (Hudson 2003; Murray 2018; Thibaud et al. 2018). No single theory on resilience can address all the relevant factors and concepts that fall into the picture (Macrae 2014; Torques et al. 2017). Mapping out the general contours of a broad and expansive framework may act as a useful coordinating platform of the future work on resilience in the high-risk industries.
Conceptual Considerations in the Construction of Resilient Buildings.
The practice of resilience encompasses three major phases, notably, assessment, planning and action (Enfors-Kautsky et al. 2018) albeit there are different approaches and guides pertinent to thinking on resilience building. However, recent surveys (Allen et al. 2018; Cosens and Fremier 2014; Huitric et al. 2016; Nemec et al. 2014) have suggested three major approaches to resilience building that include:
The assessment of theory-based resilience frameworks; Participatory resilience assessment and Resilience-based planning and operations, that have focused on more rapid assessments of resilience principles or attributes.
These approaches use different sets of resilience strategies, principles or properties, to assess relative resilience across different places and cases (Cosens and Fremier 2014; Nemec et al. 2014). There are three paradigms of resilience, namely engineering resilience, systems resilience and resilience in the complex adaptive systems ((Nuryanti et al. 2017). The engineering resilience paradigm uses metaphors of the infrastructure, such as bridges and buildings (Davoudi 2013). The engineered systems’ view of resilience focuses on how a system withstands excessive pressures and returns to normal when the pressure is removed (Nuryanti et al. 2017).
Resilience in Regional and Rural Planning for Human Settlements
Although its conceptualisation and practice continue to vary, regional planning occupies an important place in the development of many countries across the globe. The regional planning is the efficient placement of land-use activities, infrastructure and settlement growth across a larger area of land than an individual city or town (Chen Lu et al. 2014). The regional planning covers wide areas, where several cities and rural areas are organically combined. Regional planning needs to address the problems of regional disparities, overpopulation and regional economic stagnation (Hall 2010). To ascertain regional trends and decide on future directions and development strategies, it is important to not only focus on the current situation, but to accumulate basic data over a number of years.
Rural settlements are most closely and directly related to the local natural resources. The major function of the settlement and the occupation of majority of inhabitants are related to primary activities such as agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, mining and forestry. This important distinction makes it clear that settlements are not just roads, houses and other infrastructure: they are also setting of social relationships. Development structures within the rural human settlement must be properly understood and the resolution of development issues must be addressed from a more macro perspective.
Most European countries, that include UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Irish, have undergone a significant reassessment and rearrangement of the regulatory and spatial planning system. This has ushered in new institutions, processes and scale of the development planning that have much focus on regions. Unlike rural planning policies that have been increasingly concerned with controlling the amount of the physical development taking place in the countryside, regional planning brought with it the need to coordinate and manage new scales through processes and institutions of governance and the idea of ‘scalar complexity’ through the proliferation of new scales and their interaction with existing scales, institutions and processes of coordination.
The Swedish rural policy came under scrutiny in the 2017 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Swedish Territorial Review, that argues that the current government policy fails to comprehend the particular challenges faced by outlying areas and a more coherent approach, focused on developing rural strengths and potentials is required. As a result, sectoral policies, such as education and health services, spatial planning and transport, do not have a clear and coherent ‘rural articulation’. The 2017 Parliamentary Report outlined the need to develop a more integrated and holistic approach to the national rural policy. The report highlights the importance of Swedish rural areas for the development of the green economy and tourism, but notes a failure to exploit business potential and discrepancies in access to public services compared to urban areas.
Most African countries face the dilemma of developing more functionally integrated, spatially coherent, economically competitive, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive rural and urban environments. In theory, sustainable human settlements should lead to the creation of much needed socioeconomic opportunities, both locally and nationally, while at the same time should provide a strong incentive to manage nature’s strongholds in a way that would conserve them. But in reality, there are, as it is argued, limited signs of progress toward the sustainable development in Africa’s rural settlements (Cobbinah et al. 2015). With specific reference to sustainability in rural areas, Lowe and Murdoch (2014) argued that the social viability of the conserved countryside should be regarded as a primary objective of the rural planning, but that such a proposal has been neglected in contemporary debates about sustainability and the rural development.
Resilience Practices and Rural Human Settlements
In many countries, rural areas have shown new spatial-economic dynamics that have meant a contrast with the traditional urban–rural dichotomy (Akgun et al. 2015). The way resilience thinking is operationalised tends to differ from place to place. Thus, diverse practices are being used in different countries and the success of resilience thinking is being understood in the context of that particular country (LeCoze 2018). Over the past decade, resilience has been gaining ever-greater prominence in the international development discourse, emerging as one of the core principles of the sustainable urban development in the post-MDGs framework.
Resilience featured as an important theme in major global agendas since 2015 including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the New Urban Agenda. The Sendai framework aims to achieve the substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health and in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets of persons, businesses, communities and countries over the next 15 years (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015). The Paris Agreement on Climate Change requires all countries—developed and developing—to make significant commitments to address the climate change. The agreement contains provisions to hold countries accountable to their commitments and mobilise greater investments to assist developing countries in building low-carbon, climate-resilient economies (Natural Resources Defense Council 2012). The New Urban Agenda (NUA) was adopted in 2016 in Quito at Habitat 111. It focuses on what needs to be done to ensure cities and human settlements of all scale deliver the sustainable development. The NUA has three aspirational commitments: social inclusion and ending poverty; sustainable and inclusive urban prosperity and opportunities for all; and environmentally sustainable and resilient urban development. These global frameworks have helped various countries in applying resilience thinking.
Countries, such as Sweden, Canada and Australia, have applied resilience thinking in the context of urban planning and local governments in Sweden and Canada among others (Liu 2014; Sellberg et al. 2015). Australia applied resilience practices in their planning and development of rural and urban settlements. Australia’s land, estuarine and coastal areas are divided among 56 regional natural resource management organisations (NRM Region Australia 2017). In the early 2000s, organisations were established in their current form to redistribute the environmental management from the national and state governments to regional communities—an arrangement referred to as ‘the regional model’. They are concerned with the sustainable management of land, vegetation and water and deal with multiple interconnected issues, such as climate change and extreme events, biodiversity loss, invasive species and sustainable agriculture. The resilience planning in Australia grew out of a history of the applied research on resilience thinking and was enabled by state and federal policies.
The resilience assessment uses a participatory process of defining a social– ecological system, assessing its resilience and identifying options for interventions. Rather than to measure resilience, it aims to create a shared understanding of the structures and processes that shape the resilience of a complex system (Quinlan et al. 2015). The first resilience assessment was carried out as a research project in Goulburn–Broken in the early 2000s and contributed to developing the Resilience Assessment Workbook. Since 2007, about 25 of the 56 regional natural resource management organisations in Australia have adopted the resilience planning to some degree: ranging from using resilience as a goal, to using resilience thinking to inform the content, process and organisation of the strategic planning. All the plans included an adaptive management framework, intending to build systematic learning and flexibility into the planning and operations of the organisations. Previous cases in Australia demonstrated that the resilience practice contributed to establishing an adaptive management program (Walker and Salt 2012), helped dairy industry actors coordinate their governance practices and come up with joint strategies (Ayre and Nettle 2017) and led to a transformation of the Murray catchment management authority by strengthening the community engagement and adopting a culture of learning.
Sweden also embraced the operationalisation of resilience from the UN’s campaign of ‘making cities resilient’ (UNISDR 2012). Municipalities in Sweden developed a municipal plan for the local food security and sustainable food systems that bridged the longer-term sustainable development and the shorter-term crisis management (Sellberg et al. 2015). Some of the strategies, that were implemented, include environmentally friendly production methods from industries. This necessitated a view of the municipality as an interconnected system across sectors and scales and it became significant for both the crisis management and the planning for the sustainable development.
Rural settlements in Africa are affected by numerous disasters (Asare-Kyei et al. 2017; Clover 2003; Haile 2005; Reid and Vogel 2006; Zogning et al. 2007). These range from acute but infrequent events, such as major floods, droughts and epidemics that can kill or injure large numbers of people, through to chronic and recurrent events that may affect only a few households or individuals at a time, but cumulatively have the greatest impact on the poor people (ActionAid 2016; Osuteye et al. 2017). In Africa, the poor marginalised populations are often excluded from decision-making processes and lack the assets and skills needed to reduce their risk and achieve change (Braun and Gatzweiler 2014; Raleigh 2010; Taylor and Camaren 2014; Yakubu and Aderonmu 2010). Particularly, some complex emergencies in the Sahel and Horn of Africa resulted in food insecurity stemming from a combination of drought and socio-political conditions, such as conflict and conflict-related displacements, economic conditions and rising food prices (Downie 2014; Lautze and Raven-Roberts 2006; Meier et al. 2007).
The population movement between rural and urban areas (and between towns and cities) means that rural events can quickly have an impact on urban environments. The Ebola outbreak of 2014–2015 originated in rural Guinea, but spread rapidly to urban areas—and across borders (Carroll et al. 2015; Meltzer et al. 2014; Yamanis et al. 2016). These constraints mean that most governments in Africa and developing countries and poor people in rural areas have very little capacity to adapt to changes. The crucial question, however, is how can sustainable—rural settlement—societies that are risk resilient, be created? Strengthening rural human settlement planning and enforcement of appropriate building standards could contribute significantly to the resilience building. This will help to reduce exposure to hazards, by preventing settlement and development in hazardous areas. The role of policies can be placed on the basis of the precautionary planning to shield the region against (externally or internally induced) shocks; tools and actions for stabilising the region and mitigating the worst impacts of the crisis; and processes for transformation, reorientation and renewal that help the region recover from a crisis.
Various over cases would be looked at that are being shown in Figure 1.
Some Case Studies Where Resilience Thinking has been Applied.
Akutsk, Russian Federation
Located just south of the Arctic Circle, the city of Yakutsk constitutes one of an average annual temperature of −8.8°C (Kesserwan and Arteau 2017). Global warming is causing the ‘active’ layer of permafrost; usually between 30 and 60 cm thick, to expand beyond 1 m. The once hard frozen ground underneath—or continuous permafrost—is turning soft, threatening infrastructure with distortion and shortening the lifecycle of buildings. Houses and apartment blocks in Yakutsk are cracking; some were even ruled uninhabitable due to the danger of the collapse, furthering the housing shortage (Jaycen 2014). The region’s agricultural land and its major industries of gas and diamond mining are at risk of the ground settlement and thermokarst. Authorities in Yakutsk first recognised the need to adapt socio-economic development to the reality of the harsh cold climate, whilst avoiding environmental degradation. The generated cold climate urban development plan retrofitted buildings to enhance energy efficiency, provided a new drainage system and constructed better roads and 5,000 new apartment units.
Yakutsk is grossly affected by the climate change, causing the ‘active’ layer of permafrost to expand. This makes resilience a major concern in the region. Russia has attributes that provides capacity for resilience as compared to other industrialised countries and most developing countries (Carino 2009). However, despite this capacity the impacts of the climate change continue and intensify. Russia’s capacity to adapt and protect its people will be severely tested. Peoples’ livelihoods are increasingly challenged by environmental changes due to the persistent effects of the global climate change (Galloway-McLean 2017). Settlement patterns in Yakutsk that are uneven distribution (Stepanova et al. 2020) have an impact on the effectiveness of resilience practices. Yakutsk acknowledged the necessity to adapt the socio-economic development to the reality of the harsh cold climate.
The city committed to the climate change mitigation, to halt and limit occurring shifts in vegetation and wildlife (Galloway-McLean 2017). The sparsely populated territories’ sustainability depends on implementing the policies of municipal, regional and national (federal) authorities and flexibility in the natural resources management regimes (Gritsenko and Efimova 2020; Zaivok et al. 2020). Russia is an example of a state-driven, top-down model that contrasts with the bottom–up and individual-driven sustainability model in other countries. Currently, the state remains strong and although it no longer plans communities, much of the impetus for achieving sustainability comes from the government. The key factors likely to promote sustainability include health and treatment tourism in rural areas, excursion and ethnographical tourism, educational and recreational rural tourism and gastronomy tourism (Erokhin et al. 2018). Efforts to address the unique resilience challenges faced in Yakutsk are evidence to the commitment of local-level actors and one that stands to be shared during the Barcelona Resilience Days. Russia’s sustainability question has been centred on villages that provide labour to the industrial–agricultural complex.
Resilience Practices and Rural Human Settlements in Zimbabwe
Subsequently, in so far as it has existed as a development paradigm, the notion of the rural settlement has come under criticism for several shortfalls. Issues of risk and resilience were not fully incorporated into the rural human settlement in Zimbabwe (Green 2014).
Post-2000 Cyclones in Zimbabwe and Impacts.
Coupled with the slow settlement planning processes, poor living conditions in the rural areas are rampant. Rural settlements are usually built without giving adherence to building byelaws, that are usually applied in most urban settlements (Njoh 1992; Ogu 1994). This has resulted in most rural settlement dwellings being constructed from pole and mud, that are not durable and some of the buildings are too small to be habitable. Disasters have kept on repeating in same districts and provinces causing damages. Enforcements and building inspectorate services are needed, where a department of the rural planning should not only create and approve plans at business centres and growth points, but to assess building plans for proposed housing developments in terms of locality and building materials (Chambers 1982; Olorunfemi 2011; Osuteye et al. 2017). The interconnectedness of the human settlements is generating highly complex challenges that require new design and engineering approaches (Allenby and Chester 2018). The practitioners of the built environment should design, construct and operate rural human settlements that are compatible with the resilience dynamics of unpredictable environments (Hilson 2016; Woods & Hollnagel 2017). The recognition that the human settlements function as complex, interdependent and integrated social-ecological systems is essential for understanding how resilience-based planning, development and management can protect life and assets sustainably. In Zimbabwe, the resilience building is focussed on the overlap between areas of chronic vulnerability and the occurrence of shocks and stressors (Mavhura et al. 2017; UNDP 2015).
Conclusion and Policy Options
The paper sought to decipher how the resilience thinking has been integrated into human settlements as sphere and domain in that people live and engage in their day-to-activities. Emerging from the paper is that the resilience thinking has spanned decades of the development debate and transcended a number of sectors most of that are linked to the way people dwell in the places of their choice (Ayre and Nettle 2017; Wig et al. 2018). The main trigger of the resilience thinking has been noted as the search, by humankind, of habitable areas with least of risk and disaster occurrence. This means that whenever necessary, people will try by all means to avoid those places that increase their vulnerability to such natural events like flooding and earthquakes. However, risks and disasters are increasing happening due to the global warming and the climate change. Theoretically speaking and with reference to the cases cited in the paper, it is quite evident that the resilience thinking has actually become the resilience practice and there are various initiatives at policy and practical levels to make it a reality. In the developed world, efforts are being putting towards the resilience building and construction of that Africa is also following the same. The idea is to protect life and assets in case of emergencies. Countries are investing to reduce such mishaps as water stress and crop and livestock destruction. It has emerged in the foregoing analysis that rural areas have always been a neglected aspect of the human development. With increasing extreme weather events like cyclones, hurricanes and heat, the focus is beginning to be put on rural areas with respect to both infrastructure and superstructure investments. It is concluded that the conversion of ‘thought to practice’ in terms of the resilience is a stride in the right direction. It is recommended that the countries, at the central government level, put in place flexible policies in the fast achieving resilience practice, while at the local government level, there is serious implementation of such policies. That was rural sustainability and enhancement are attainable.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
