Rigidity Trap Research Articles

Using adaptive cycles and panarchy to understand processes of touristification and gentrification in Valencia, Spain

This paper takes a multi-level approach to gain a better understanding of (tourism) gentrification and tourism excesses in three popular tourist neighbourhoods in Valencia, Spain. This city radically changed tourism policies in 2015, from a top-down approach that was focused on economic growth, towards one in which localhood and community development are stimulated. However, the change has done little to mitigate issues related to high levels of gentrification and touristification. This issue has been investigated using adaptive cycles and panarchy as a framework. Using these concepts has helped clarify how current policies mainly stimulate bottom-up innovations to overcome the lack of creative capacity at the local level (in other words, the ‘poverty trap’). Yet they insufficiently address processes that relate to the worldviews and higher governance levels that contribute to maintaining the current economic growth-oriented tourism ecosystem (the ‘rigidity trap’). The implications of our findings and ways forward conclude the paper.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion: Evolving into belonging, dignity, and justice.

The authors want to invite the integrated care community to reflect with us on an evolutionary shift in how we approach matters of justice and equity: from a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) framework to a perspective that centers the relational concepts of belonging, dignity, and justice (BDJ) for a more just world (Davis, 2021). Our desire to reflect, question, and pivot is inspired by the Ecocycle Planning Model-which I (Deepu George) used to critically frame the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association's (CFHA) history in Part I of the article (George, 2023a) and creatively anticipate our future in Part II (George & Khatri, 2024). In this article, the authors want to focus on the nodes of maturity and creative destruction, as well as the idea of the rigidity trap-to examine our collective energies around the idea of DEI. With CFHA's 30th anniversary upon us, we pause and reflect on not only the benefits of DEI efforts heretofore, but also the pitfalls, to avoid the rigidity trap, which is likely to occur when we embrace tenets of an idea that may no longer serve the values we once aspired to or fail to evolve in favor of the familiar. Considering critiques of the limitations of DEI work in practice and literature, the authors believe a BDJ approach will better inform our growth moving forward. Therefore, the authors want to reflect, honor, and build upon the impact and gains from DEI and adapt them to better serve the needs of all-especially the historically marginalized and underrepresented voices. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Delicate Equilibrium: Unveiling the Curvilinear Nexus Between Supply Concentration and Organizational Resilience

AbstractThe ability of organizations to remain resilient in the face of supply chain disruptions has been severely tested due to their increased frequency and impact. This study leverages the adaptive cycle framework to investigate the intricate dynamics between supply concentration and organizational resilience. We unveil a paradox where, up to a critical threshold, supply concentration fortifies resilience through tight‐knit buyer–supplier relationships and a bolstered resource base. Yet, surpassing this tipping point precipitates a rigidity trap, eroding the resilience fabric of organizations. Additionally, we scrutinize the nuanced roles of three dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation – proactiveness, innovativeness and risk‐taking – in shaping this complex interplay. We test our hypotheses using both secondary and primary data collected from Chinese firms, employing ordinary least‐squares regression and survival analysis. The results show that an inverted U‐shaped relationship emerges between supply concentration and organizational resilience. Furthermore, our research generally confirms the conjectured moderating influences of entrepreneurial orientation dimensions, enriching our understanding of how they calibrate the balance between concentration benefits and vulnerabilities. This study offers a new perspective on the implications of supply concentration for organizational resilience and contributes to the intersection of supply chain management, organizational resilience and entrepreneurship.

Contemplating on the end of integrated care-Part I: Anticipating creative destruction.

In this article, the author frames the development of integrated care and the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) through the ecocycle planning model. With four distinct stages of development and renewal-gestation, birth, maturity, and creative destruction-the ecocycle planning model encourages organizations to consider ways to ask questions to avoid a rigidity trap, which in the model appears as a process after maturity. As CFHA approaches its 30th year in 2024, the author documents a rough, imperfect history for a shared understanding of how integrated care and CFHA reached maturity and invites the readers to engage in critical questions to avoid the rigidity trap. The author contends that integrated care as a movement and CFHA as an organization have the capacity and a history of learning to ask informed questions to avoid falling prey to the rigidity trap. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding the governance of sustainability pathways: hydraulic megaprojects, social–ecological traps, and power in networks of action situations

To enable sustainability pathways, we need to understand how social–ecological systems (SES) respond to different governance configurations, considering their historical, institutional, political, and power conditions. We advance a robust methodological approach for the integrated analysis of those conditions in SES traps. Our advancement consists of a novel combination of the networks of action situations approach with an agency-based polycentric power typology and the concept of discursive power. We test the approach by building on previous research on the Doñana estuary–delta SES (Guadalquivir estuary), which is characterized by a rigidity trap in the context of ecosystem and water governance. Specifically, we focus on a recent hydraulic megaproject involving deep dredging in the Guadalquivir estuary, finally canceled due to its broad negative socioeconomic and environmental repercussions. According to our analysis, certain governance, institutional, and informational mechanisms currently prevent further SES degradation in Doñana. However, key governance actors are caught in a lasting coordination failure prone to mutual defection strategies owing to power dynamics and discursive-institutional inertia. Although seemingly stable due to counteractive mechanisms among actors, this situation is at continuous risk of being unbalanced by powerful actors promoting large SES interventions such as deep dredging. Such interventions bear the systemic risk of strong suppression of SES functions, and a regime shift to a lock-in trap. This overall undesirable situation might be escaped through transformative policy designs that take into account meso-level mechanisms, such as discursive power and its role in non-decision-making, pragmatic inaction, and inefficient investment and infrastructure.

Navigating adaptive cycles to understand destination complex evolutionary process

ABSTRACT There is a recent surge to unfold the tourism destination's intrinsic nature as a complex adaptive system, such as the dynamic and scale interactions among tourism system components and its environment. As the world gets more uncertain, it becomes more critical to understand how dynamic and complex interactions shape the destination's resilience and its evolution process. Yet, such is under-explored. Taking the East Suburb Coconut Trees scenic area in Hainan (ESCT), China, as a case, this study adopts adaptive cycle heuristics to shed light on the critical evolution mechanisms. This study shows that ESCT had undergone two adaptive cycles, suffered three shocks, and experienced interaction mode from external enterprises-led to interdependent development mode and, finally, local-oriented mode. During this process, the destination's resilience changed from vulnerable to absorptive and, finally, rigid. There is no reorganization stage between the two cycles, which resulted in a limited increase in the destination's resilience. The increasing local involvement built absorptive capability but also locked the destination into a rigidity trap in the long term. This study is the first to reveal the role of resilience in understanding complex system interactions and the destination evolution process. Practical implications for resilient destination management are provided.

The many-headed Hydra: assessing the Indigenous-hydropower cycle in Costa Rica

This article explores the intersection of hydropower development and Indigenous rights within the context of climate governance. A historical rift between dam supporters and opponents has evolved into a contentious ebb and flow of dam proposal-resistance between hydropower industries and Indigenous communities around the world. Conflicts have recently intensified as dams are promoted as a climate mitigation strategy and are increasingly encroaching on Indigenous territories. Research analyzes a case study in Costa Rica, where an Indigenous-hydropower cycle emerged from a 50-year feud between the national electricity institute (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad or ICE, pronounced E-say) and the Brörán peoples over development of the Térraba river—each time the state proposed a dam, the Brörán peoples defeated it, and another would emerge in its place. In this article, I ask why dam building continues despite the multitude of critiques and documented negative social-ecological consequences of hydropower projects. To address this question, I introduce the adaptive cycle, which serves as a heuristic model to investigate how and why the cycle continues, as well as to understand the power, justice, and equity issues involved in climate decision-making processes. Through a political ecology framework, I assess the hybridity of interrelated social-ecological, political, and economic factors encompassing the human-water nexus, conceptualized as a hydrosocial territory. Analysis suggests a rigidity trap that spans across multiple scales of governance causes the cycle to repeat, and given the current acceptance of hydropower within the climate governance arena, the cycle is likely to continue.

Caught in the Rigidity Trap? Limits to Farmers’ Adaptation to Water Challenges in Ghana’s Smallholder Irrigation Schemes

This article examines how smallholder farmers adapt their behaviors in response to water challenges. It employs a mixed-methods design, including focus group sessions and a survey of, and interviews with, farmers and key stakeholders concerned with government and farmer-led smallholder irrigation schemes (SIS) in Ashaiman, Ghana. A water-dependent adaptive index (WDAI) is developed from the data to capture the dynamics of farmers’ adaptive behaviors. The analysis suggests that rigid institutional structures, prescribing (in)appropriate farming behaviors within the government SIS, constrain farmers’ capacity to adapt their behaviors. The absence of such rigidity provides flexibility for farmers within the farmer-led SIS to easily adapt by focusing more on their behaviors’ expected consequences. These schemes require government support (but not control) to create institutional spaces for experimentation and social learning, which are vital to farmers’ developing mental models that focus more on the Consequentiality of their farming behaviors, and less on its Appropriateness.

Explaining and Measuring Social-Ecological Pathways: The Case of Global Changes and Water Security

The Social-Ecological Systems framework serves as a valuable framework to explore and understand social and ecological interactions, and pathways in water governance. However, it lacks a robust understanding of change. We argue an analytical and methodological approach to engaging global changes in SES is critical to strengthening the scope and relevance of the SES framework. Relying on SES and resilience thinking, we propose an institutional and cognitive model of change where institutions and natural resources systems co-evolve. Our model of change provides a dynamic understanding of SES that stands on three causal mechanisms: institutional complexity trap, rigidity trap, and learning processes. We illustrate how data cube technology could overcome current limitations and offer reliable avenues for testing hypotheses about the dynamics of Social-Ecological Systems and water security by offering to combine spatial and time data with no major technical requirements for users.

Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies. Ronald K. Faulseit, ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016, 552 pp. $70.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8093-3399-8.

<i>Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies</i>. Ronald K. Faulseit, ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016, 552 pp. $70.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8093-3399-8.

Obstacles to developing sustainable cities: the real estate rigidity trap

Obstacles to developing sustainable cities: the real estate rigidity trap

Subjectivity and social-ecological systems: a rigidity trap (and sense of place as a way out)

The fundamental point of this paper is that constructs such as system identity stability and changes (tips, transitions, transformations from one identity to another), are subjectively perceived, and acted upon by the social actors that occupy these systems. However, social-ecological systems (SES) research has not yet adequately engaged this subjectivity. I argue, here, that this relative lack of recognition of subjectivity has become a “rigidity trap” for SES scholars. Subjectivity is messy and difficult, and does not fit particularly well within the systems perspectives that characterize resilience work. As such, this lack of engagement has led to self-reinforcing perspectives that emphasize some elements and de-emphasize others, creating a systematic neglect of some principles that might productively challenge existing notions and expand our thinking. Sense of place theory, which emphasizes the creation of meaning as systematically distributed throughout society, is offered as a mechanism for helping SES researchers more fully engage subjectivity.

Against the current: rewiring rigidity trap dynamics in urban water governance through civic engagement

This paper investigates how the agency of local residents can affect persistent and unsustainable practices in urban water supply governance. Using a case study from Bangalore, India, we analyze a social–ecological trap which developed after a shift to external water provision paired with rapid urbanization. The reluctance of forsaking initial investments in infrastructure and competence, and the subsequent loss of the local network of lakes built for harvesting rainwater, reinforced dependence on external sources while undermining groundwater levels in the city. These feedbacks made water scarcity a structurally persistent feature of Bangalore. This situation started to change when local residents recently started organizing to preserve and restore Bangalore’s lakes. By entering collaborative management agreements with municipal authorities, these lake groups have restored and established effective protection of five lakes. Through a case study of this civic engagement we show that the lake restorations have the potential to counteract trap mechanisms by restoring ecological functions, and by reducing water scarcity as groundwater levels rise and authorities are relieved from maintenance and monitoring tasks. Importantly, these lake groups have also created opportunities for over a dozen similar groups to form across the city. This demonstrates that social movements can be an important source of change in social–ecological traps.

The Rigidity Trap in Global Resilience: Neoliberalisation Through Principles, Standards, and Benchmarks

This article offers a critical social science perspective on the globalisation of disaster resilience. It is argued that the regulatory experimentation, typical of neoliberalisation, has begun to increase standardisation of emergency and security practices. Examples of this can be seen in the growth of general principles, non-statutory guidance, and international standards designed to improve resilience to disasters. This represents the creeping ‘neoliberalisation’ of ‘disaster resilience’. When this results in over-standardisation a ‘rigidity trap’ is created. Regulatory experimentation may enhance the resiliency of organisations and infrastructure, but when standards and benchmarks seek to create ‘resilient subjects’ and ‘resilient communities’ the positive potential is lost in bureaucratic inflexibility. The neoliberalisation of resilience, if unchecked, will undermine the very flexible capabilities and adaptive capacity it is claimed that a focus on resilience can create. Este artículo ofrece una perspectiva de ciencia social crítica sobre la globalización de la resiliencia ante los desastres. Se sostiene que la experimentación reguladora, típica del neoliberalismo, ha comenzado a aumentar la estandarización de prácticas de emergencia y seguridad. Ejemplos de esto se pueden ver en el crecimiento de principios generales, orientaciones no reglamentarias y estándares internacionales, diseñados para mejorar la resiliencia a los desastres. Esto representa el crecimiento paulatino de la ‘neoliberalización’ de la ‘resiliencia a los desastres’. Cuando esto resulta en un exceso de normalización, se crea una ‘trampa de rigidez’. La experimentación normativa puede realzar la resiliencia de organizaciones e infraestructura, pero cuando los estándares y puntos de referencia buscan crear ‘sujetos resilientes’ y ‘comunidades resilientes’, el potencial positivo se pierde en la inflexibilidad burocrática. La neoliberalización de la resiliencia, sin verificación, entorpecerá las muy flexibles habilidades y la capacidad adaptiva que un enfoque en la resiliencia puede crear. 本文提出了关于灾难恢复方面的全球化的一个社会科学批评视角，认为调控性的试验，在新自由主义化的过程中的典型的调控性的实验已经开始增加紧急状态的标准化和安全惯例。这方面的例子可见于一般性的原则、非法规性的指针，以及专门用来改进灾后恢复的国际标准的增长。这代表着“灾难恢复”的缓慢“新自由主义化”。当着产生过分标准化时，“固化性陷阱”就产生了。调控性的实验可能增进组织机构和基础设施的恢复，但是，当标准和尺度试图创造“恢复性的主题”和“恢复性的共同体”，积极的潜力就在官僚的不灵活性中丧失。恢复的新自由主义化将削弱灵活性，适应性能力据说导致了对恢复的关注。 이 글은 재해 복원의 세계화에 대한 비판적 사회과학적 관점을 제시한다. 전형적인 신자유주의화인 규제 실험은 위기와 행동의 표준화를 높이기 시작햇다. 이러한 예들은 일반적인 원칙, 법으로 정하지 않은 지침과 국제적인 표준들의 증가에서 찾을 수 있다. 이것은 은밀하게 이루어진 ‘재해 복구’의 ‘신자유주의화’ 를 보여준다. 이것이 과잉되게 표준화되었을 때, ‘경직성 덫’이 만들어진다. 규제적인 실험은 조직과 하부구조의 회복력을 높일 것이다. 그러나 표준과 기준이 ‘복구 주체’와 ‘복구 커뮤니티’를 만들고자 한다면, 긍정적인 잠재력이 관료적 경직성 속에서 사라진다. 저지되지 않는다면, 복구의 신자유주의화는 유연한 역량과 적응적 능력을 약화시킬 것이다. Эта статья предлагает критический взгляд социологии на глобализацию противодействия бедствиям. Утверждается, что регулирующее экспериментирование, типичное для неолиберализма, начало повышать уровень стандартизации аварийной и охранной практик. Примеры этого можно увидеть в росте общих принципов, неуставных руководств и международных стандартов, направленных на повышение устойчивости к бедствиям. Все это представляет собой медленно ползущий “неолиберализм” “противодействия бедствиям”. Когда эти меры приводят к сверхстандартизации, “ловушку жесткости” можно считать созданной. Регулирующее экспериментирование может повысить устойчивость организации и инфраструктуры к бедствиям, но когда стандарты и критерии стремятся создать “устойчивые субъекты” и “устойчивые сообщества”, положительный потенциал теряется в бюрократической негибкости. Неолиберализация противодействий бедствиям, если ее не остановить, будет подрывать возможности к гибкости и способности к адаптации.

Facilitating Transitional Processes in Rigid Institutional Regimes for Water Management and Wetland Conservation: Experience from the Guadalquivir Estuary

Traditional policies for water resources management and wetland conservation are often based on command-andcontrol approaches. The latter tend to drive the human–wetland–water system into pathological states, characterized by more vulnerable ecosystems and rigid institutions for governance. The overcoming of these states may rest in the development of flexible and adaptive institutional regimes that rely on adaptive governance and management. Because past factors might constrain the implementation of more flexible adaptive approaches to management, it is important to understand the historical mechanisms underlying the genesis of institutional rigidity. We first present the results of a historical analysis of Donana, which can be characterized as a pathological water socio-ecosystem governed through rigid institutional regimes for water resources management and wetland conservation. In a second step, we analyze the advances achieved during a recent, large-scale restoration program for the Donana wetlands, which adhered explicitly to the tenets of adaptive management. Our analysis indicated that the historical persistence of command-and-control approaches has been a path-dependent process that led to the emergence of a rigid institutional regime and caused it to enter a rigidity trap. However, the achievements of the restoration program suggest that a more flexible and adaptive regime could be developed through the introduction of adaptive management at the operational levels, using specifically tailored action research programs. To conclude, we speculate that the research strategy outlined could be extended to comply with, or complement, the requirements of the EU's Water Framework Directive in other European water socio-ecosystems.

The US Fire Learning Network: Springing a Rigidity Trap through Multiscalar Collaborative Networks

Wildland fire management in the United States is caught in a rigidity trap, an inability to apply novelty and innovation in the midst of crisis. Despite wide recognition that public agencies should engage in ecological fire restoration, fire suppression still dominates planning and management, and restoration has failed to gain traction. The U.S. Fire Learning Network (FLN), a multiscalar collaborative endeavor established in 2002 by federal land management agencies and The Nature Conservancy, offers the potential to overcome barriers that inhibit restoration planning and management. By circulating people, planning products, and information among landscapeand regional-scale collaboratives, this network has facilitated the development and dissemination of innovative approaches to ecological fire restoration. Through experimentation and innovation generated in the network, the FLN has fostered change by influencing fire and land management plans as well as federal policy. We suggest that multiscalar collaborative planning networks such as the FLN can facilitate overcoming the rigidity traps that prevent resource management agencies from responding to complex cross-scalar problems.

Reforms and re-elections in OECD countries

Economic reform is sometimes seen as damaging to a government’s re-election chances, but anecdotal evidence from OECD countries would not seem to strongly support this perception. This paper tests this hypothesis on a sample of 21 OECD countries over the period 1985–2003, controlling for other economic and political factors that may affect re-election. It is found that the chances of re-election for incumbent governments are not significantly affected by their record of pro-market reforms. However, the electoral impact of reform is found to differ strongly depending on which types of policies are considered. In particular, reform measures that are more likely to hurt large groups of ‘insiders’ seem electorally more damaging. A series of framework conditions appears to affect the impact of reforms on re-elections. Reformist governments in countries with rigid product and labour markets tend to be voted out of office, suggesting the existence of a ‘rigidity trap’. While fiscal stimulus is not an effective instrument to ‘sweeten the pill’ and raise the odds of re-election, the presence of liberal financial markets appears to soften electoral resistance to structural reform. The latter finding is of particular relevance in the current financial crisis: forward-looking governments should not rush to over-regulate financial markets in order not to compromise the feasibility of product and labour market reforms. —Marco Buti, Alessandro Turrini, Paul Van den Noord and Pietro Biroli

Social Transformation and Its Human Costs in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest

ABSTRACT Change is inevitable, but some changes and transformations are more dramatic and fraught with suffering than others. Resilience theory suggests the concept of a “rigidity trap” as an explanation for these differences. In rigidity traps, a high degree of connectivity and the suppression of innovation prolong an increasingly rigid state, with the result that the eventual transformation is harsh. Three archaeological cases from the U.S. Southwest (Mimbres, Mesa Verde, and Hohokam) and new methods for assessing transformations and rigidity are used to evaluate this concept. They reveal the expected association between the severity of transformation and degree of rigidity, suggesting that a rigidity trap contributed to the Hohokam decline, which included significant human suffering. Possible causes of rigidity, with implications for today's world, are explored.

Adaptive Capacity and Traps

Adaptive capacity is the ability of a living system, such as a social-ecological system, to adjust responses to changing internal demands and external drivers. Although adaptive capacity is a frequent topic of study in the resilience literature, there are few formal models. This paper introduces such a model and uses it to explore adaptive capacity by contrast with the opposite condition, or traps. In a social- ecological rigidity trap, strong self-reinforcing controls prevent the flexibility needed for adaptation. In the model, too much control erodes adaptive capacity and thereby increases the risk of catastrophic breakdown. In a social-ecological poverty trap, loose connections prevent the mobilization of ideas and resources to solve problems. In the model, too little control impedes the focus needed for adaptation. Fluctuations of internal demand or external shocks generate pulses of adaptive capacity, which may gain traction and pull the system out of the poverty trap. The model suggests some general properties of traps in social-ecological systems. It is general and flexible, so it can be used as a building block in more specific and detailed models of adaptive capacity for a particular region.

Is the Euro Working? The Euro and European Labour Markets

Now that time has passed since the introduction of the euro as a commercial currency, it is possible to assess many arguments made in the abstract during the 1990s about European monetary union. This article shows that the euro zone still falls short as an optimal currency area in most respects. In particular, it undertakes an empirical analysis of the labour market and finds no progress toward flexibility or integration. These results challenge assertions of ‘endogenous currency area’ proponents that the euro area would become optimal ‘after the fact’, and that labour markets would serve as the principal avenue of adjustment. Instead, a ‘rigidity trap’ has developed in the euro area, consisting of relatively tight monetary policy, forced fiscal consolidation, and a risk of deflation in some economies. These conditions have compounded the difficulties of structural adjustment in European labour markets.