Sustainability and resilience: Key ideas for our future

Why take the Sustainability and Resilience Perspectives into account? 

Key contemporary challenges, from climate change and biodiversity loss to dealing with inequalities, bring new challenges to European rural areas and farming. Change also brings opportunities to foster more resilient, inclusive and sustainable rural regions. This however calls for building capacities and resources, so more individuals and communities are empowered to contribute to change, including women. Gender equality is also one of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5). At the core of the notion of sustainability is the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability can also go hand in hand with resilience. Sustainability and resilience have become terms commonly used and perhaps mis-used in some cases.  

What do the Sustainability and Resilience Perspective Concept Notes provide?  

• Key insights on these important ideas that influence our modern world and are crucial to take into account in gender equality and rural development contexts.  

• Sustainability and resilience are also complex notions and the concept notes touch on some of the key complexities to help navigate these ideas and avoid the pitfalls. 

Explore the Concept Notes to learn more:  

• Read FLIARA’s Concept Note No.16 on Adaptive Cycles’ and Relational Resilience to explore the meaning and debate around the notion of resilience. It cuts straight to crucial questions in the massive resilience debate, such as if we accept that resilience is about enhancing the ability of a system to respond to change, the key question then becomes resilience to what, and resilience for whom. Also provided are ideas on how the concept can be applied.  

• Concept Note No.17 digs into a particular area of thinking in resilience around the idea of Positive/Negative Resilience and Entrepreneurship. Resilience can be positive or negative depending on the environment and power relations. For example, negative resilience can be created by male-dominated value systems that are difficult to change.  

• The different Sustainability Dimensions are explored in Concept Note No.18. It discusses how sustainable development should imply progress in all dimensions simultaneously, but also how balancing environmental, social, and economic considerations to ensure long-term well-being is a tricky business. 

• Concept Note No.19 explores Transformation (Long Term Sustainability) and the needs that this more radical idea demands, such as addressing the root causes of unsustainable practices rather than just treating the symptoms.  

Read the full concept notes in the FLIARA Conceptual Framework report, see pages 89-96.