The three main goals of ecological economic theory seek to predict and prevent system breakdowns. However chaos theory and human uncertainty/ignorance guarantee that shocks, breakdowns and catastrophes like COVID-19 will increasingly occur due to converging environmental resource crises. The challenge then is designing a resilient (safe-fail) economy that can endure, adapt to and successfully recover from breakdowns and avoid collapse. To date little attention has been paid in ecological economics to the implications of resilience for broader economic decisions affecting the design of global civilization. This paper provides a general introduction to resilience and an argument for why it should become a much larger focus of ecological economic research going forward. Five arguments are advanced for why resilience should not be subsumed under an existing goal, including that efforts to build resilience have the potential to both complement and contradict the other three goals, especially efficiency. The Resilience Alliance‘s adaptive cycle highlighting the cost to resilience of increasing scale and complexity meshes readily with ecological economist's own critiques of growth, encouraging increased collaboration between these transdisciplines. The need to further study these tensions provides justification for adding “Resilient Design” as a distinct fourth policy goal to core ecological economic theory.
Living to Spend Another Day: Exploring Resilience as a New Fourth Goal of Ecological Economics