Copyright © 2014 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance. Broderstad, E. G., and E. Eythórsson. 2014. Resilient communities? Collapse and recovery of a social-ecological system in Arctic Norway. Ecology and Society 19(3): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06533-190301 Research, part of a Special Feature on Rebuilding Fisheries and Threatened Communities: the Social-Ecology of a Particularly Wicked Problem Resilient communities? Collapse and recovery of a social-ecological system in Arctic Norway Else Grete Broderstad 1 and Einar Eythórsson 2 ABSTRACT. Fisheries-dependent Sami communities in the Norwegian Arctic face major challenges adapting and responding to social- ecological changes. On a local scale, communities and households continually adapt and respond to interacting changes in natural conditions and governance frameworks. Degradation of the marine environment and decline in coastal settlements can move social- ecological systems beyond critical thresholds or tipping points, where the system irreversibly enters a different state. We examined the recent social-ecological history of 2 fjords in Finnmark, North Norway, which have coped, over the past 30 years, with the collapse of local fish stocks, harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus) and red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) invasions, and increasingly restrictive resource management regimes. Further, we explored similarities and differences in their social-ecological histories and discuss how the concepts of resilience and tipping points can be applied as analytical tools in empirical studies of community response to social- ecological change. We show that although the ecological changes in the 2 communities have consisted of similar developments, they have been temporally different in ways that may have affected coping strategies and influenced the available options at different times. The apparent resilience of Sami fishing communities can be understood as the result of response strategies employed by communities and households, and the economic opportunities that have opened up as a result of a combination of ecological change and institutional and political reforms. Key Words: coastal cod; community response; individual vessel quotas; Porsáŋgu; red king crab; resilience, Sami Parliament; tipping points; Várjat vuotna INTRODUCTION According to the Arctic Human Development Report (2004), Arctic societies have a well-deserved reputation for resilience in the face of change. However, what exactly constitutes social resilience in these societies and why some of them are more resilient than others are open questions. Response capabilities of human systems in the face of short- and long-term social- ecological changes depend on the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change (Folke 2006). We examine the recent social-ecological histories of two coastal Sami communities to discuss how communities respond to changes in ecosystems and governance systems. Ecological and institutional parameters define feasible response strategies, as well as the success of such strategies. An assessment of the ability of communities to successfully cope with these changes, in terms of being able to sustain local fisheries and secure the survival of basic local institutions, is one way to measure social resilience, defined as the capacity to change to maintain identity (Carmack et al. 2012). The communities included in the case studies are situated within a social-ecological system that has gone through dramatic changes in the past three decades: the fisheries communities in Porsáŋgu/Porsanger fjord and Várjat vuotna/Varanger fjord in Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway. If these changes are irreversible, it is reasonable to assume that they have already stretched the adaptive capacity of the ecological system beyond its limits and moved the system beyond a tipping point into a different state (cf. Wassmann and Lenton 2012, Young 2012). In some cases, however, social systems can adapt, or even benefit, from such changes. Instead of identifying, as many modeling exercises do, proxy indicators for social resilience and potential tipping points, we look into the adaptive strategies employed by actors and institutions within the communities in response to social- ecological change. The changes in the two communities consisted of similar events that were temporally different in ways that affected the response options available to the communities at different times. Communities respond to ecological change with different coping and adaptation strategies, but their available options are dependent on interactions between these changes and social structures, writ large. Recovery of an ecosystem does not automatically lead to recovery of a resource-based social system, as exemplified by cases where ecosystem crisis is met by institutional reforms that allow for privatization of use rights and, as a consequence, the benefits from the resources are taken over by nonlocal actors. Ecological changes that occur within a fjord system are likely to be part of ecological processes happening on a larger geographical scale; marine stocks migrate and fluctuate within a larger habitat and are affected by ecological events outside the fjord system. The same applies to social change: local fisheries are affected by global markets and technological innovations, as well as by resource governance at local, regional, national, or international scales. We draw up a framework for analysis of community responses to social-ecological changes that includes the connections, over the shorter and longer term, between governance at different levels and adaptive strategies. We also identify changes in the marine ecology in the two fjords and the interactions between ecological and governance changes that have taken place there since the 1980s, as well as the different consequences of those interactions for the fisheries in the two communities. Finally, we discuss whether this type of analysis brings us closer to an understanding of how resilience is constituted in the case-study communities and whether the social-ecological system of which the communities are a part has passed a tipping point and entered a new state. 1 Centre for Sami Studies, University of Tromsø, 2 Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, Tromsø