The Stability-Resilience Trade Off

Apply to the ecosystem of governance as you see fit. Fascinating paper:

We call the result “the pathology of natural resource management” (Holling 1986; Holling 1995), a simple but far-reaching observation defined here as follows: when the range of natural variation in a system is reduced, the system loses resilience. That is, a system in which natural levels of variation have been reduced through command-and-control activities will be less resilient than an unaltered system when subsequently faced with external perturbations, either of a natural (storms, fires, floods) or human-induced (social or institutional) origin. We believe this principle applies beyond ecosystems and is particularly relevant at the intersection of ecological, social, and economic systems.