Chapter 14 Between Resilience and Adaptation: A Historical Framework for Understanding Stability and Transformation of Societies to Shocks and Stress John Haldon, Annelise Binois-Roman, Merle Eisenberg, Adam Izdebski, Lee Mordechai, Timothy Newfield, Philip Slavin, Sam White, and Konrad Wnęk Abstract How environmental stress affected past societies is an area of increasing relevance for contemporary planning and policy concerns. The paper below examines a series of case studies that demonstrate that short-term strategies that sustain a state or a specific bundle of vested interests did not necessarily promote longer-term societal resilience and often increased structural pressures leading to systemic crisis. Some societies or states possessed suf ficient structural flexibility to overcome very serious short-term challenges without further exacerbating existing inequalities. But even where efforts were made consciously to assist the entire J. Haldon (&) Princeton University, Princeton, USA e-mail: jhaldon@princeton.edu A. Binois-Roman University of Paris 1 (Sorbonne), Paris, France M. Eisenberg National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (Annapolis), Annapolis, USA A. Izdebski Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany L. Mordechai Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel T. Newfield Georgetown University, Washingtonm, USA P. Slavin University of Stirling, Stirling, UK S. White Ohio State University, Columbus, USA K. Wnęk Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Linkov et al. (eds.), COVID-19: Systemic Risk and Resilience, Risk, Systems and Decisions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71587-8_14 235 In: I. Linkov et al. (eds.), COVID-19: Systemic Risk and Resilience, Risk, Systems and Decisions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71587-8_14