THEORY-132: Stability, a system's speed of return to equilibrium after disturbance, and resilience, its capacity to absorb change and persist within its domain of attraction, are distinct properties that can trade off, so a system can be highly unstable and highly resilient, and managing it for constancy can erode its resilience

Source

Holling (1973), LIT-741, read in NOTE-572.

Holling (LIT-741) argues from model behaviour and from case histories.

Models. Adding realistic features to predator–prey models (lags, nonlinear responses, contagious attack, a reproduction threshold) turns globally stable or unstable behaviour into bounded domains of attraction. Within a domain, trajectories return; outside it, a population goes extinct. Stability describes behaviour near the equilibrium, and persistence depends on the boundary.
Cases. The spruce budworm forest cycles through outbreaks and is “highly unstable”, and that instability renews the forest and keeps the system going. Forest insects in extreme climates fluctuate widely yet absorb extremes. Great Lakes fisheries were constant and collapsed under exploitation. A lake kept one state for millennia, then flipped after a small hydrological change.
Definitions. Resilience is the ability “to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist”. Stability is “the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance”.

The distinction could have failed if persistence had tracked closeness of return. The budworm and insect cases show it does not.

Not that instability causes resilience in general. The cases are chosen to show the two can separate, and Holling says his sample “is inevitably biased”.
Not that maximum-yield management always erodes resilience. That is argued from the framework and supported by examples, not tested.
Not Aubin’s viability. Resilience is about staying within a domain of attraction of the system’s own dynamics. Viability (THEORY-134) is about staying within a constraint set given apart from the dynamics. A regime can be resilient, hard to dislodge, while violating what it needs.

Alternative stable states (THEORY-136) develops the domain of attraction into a test for whether a shift is a move between attractors.
The owner’s essay. §6.1’s “stability is not viability” has Holling’s distinction as its older and more cited ancestor. Northstar’s emergency regime, suppressing disturbance while eroding maintenance, is the maximum-sustained-yield story in an organization.

Status	Active
Tags	ecology, complex-systems
Source	LIT-741 — Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems
Presupposed by	THEORY-136 — A persistent or abrupt change is not evidence that a system has alternative stable states: field patterns such as jumps, multimodality and dual relationships also arise from a stepwise driver or a simple threshold, and only hysteresis, initial-state dependence or a lasting shift after a temporary disturbance, with slow return excluded, comes close to showing one
Supports	CLAIM-079 — Stability does not entail viability: a system can occupy a stable regime while losing access to trajectories that keep satisfying its constraints, CLAIM-184 — Anchors entrench: a structure that persists early can lock in its framing, so that later structure grows on it and alternatives become hard to reach, and retirement by status is the record's remedy only if superseded anchors stop attracting new structure, CLAIM-195 — For an argument, the constraint set that persistence is relative to is fixed by an amendable decision, not discovered: the record stipulates what counts as the same claim persisting, which makes the choice explicit without making it non-arbitrary