Designing for resilience: permaculture as a transdisciplinary methodology in applied resilience research

Thomas W. Henfrey, Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Change (cE3c), CCIAM - Climate Change research group, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL), Portugal; Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, Bristol, UK.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-09916-230233

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Abstract

In this paper I examine the relationship between resilience research and permaculture, a system for the design and creation of human habitats, organizations, and projects rooted in ethics of sustainability, well-being, and equity. I argue that applying permaculture as a tool in research design can enable research to contribute more directly, immediately, and effectively to building community resilience. I explore this argument with reference to three case studies of research projects that involve permaculture as both research topic and methodology, at multiple geographical scales. Each of these cases provides evidence that research activities contribute to community resilience, and that this can be attributed to the application of permaculture principles and methods in research design. In particular, permaculture embeds iterative processes of action learning able to enhance adaptive capacity within communities in which it is applied. This includes transdisciplinary communities that mobilize around specific research interests and communities of place and/or practice that participate in transdisciplinary research. I suggest that this may be an instance of a general situation whereby research both incorporates and enhances existing learning processes that contribute to adaptive capacity and community resilience. I tentatively propose for such collaborations the label “Mode 3” resilience research, and suggest further research be done to identify and examine further cases in both permaculture and other fields of resilience research.

Key words

community resilience; participatory action research; permaculture; transdisciplinary research; transformation

Copyright © 2018 by the author(s). Published here under license by The Resilience Alliance. This article is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt the work for noncommercial purposes provided the original author and source are credited, you indicate whether any changes were made, and you include a link to the license.