Evaluating Resilience of Common Pool Resource System Against Globalization: The Case of Common Ranch in Jeju Island, Korea.

The resilience has been defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance without changing its core function and structure. To evaluate resilience of system, it is necessary to determine which system factors are crucial to identifying drivers impacting on resilient system. In this study, 76 common ranches in Jeju Island were investigated to understand resilience of the common pool resource systems (CPRs). Common ranches in Jeju Island is undergoing transformation due to globalization; some ranches have collapsed and others survived by adopting various solutions. Thus, we assessed resilience of common ranches by comparing system factors between those two cases (i.e., existent and collapsed) and selecting them as resilience index. Here, we focused on ‘Community resilience’, which is defined as the “maintenance, development and engagement of community resources by members consisting of community to flourish in the system which is dynamic and unpredictable. It was possible because 76 ranches have similar social, economic, political, and ecological settings, so that assumption that the difference of resilience in common ranch comes from internal characteristics of community (i.e., system factor in terms of community).

Historical disturbances, function, and structure of common ranch system were defined through historical data from local government and region-scale studies. After understanding ecological and socio-economic context of each ranch system, available system factors gleaned from government (e.g., location, productivity, number of members, ownership, type of management, subsidies etc.) were statistically analyzed using SPSS to make the resilience assessment model for Jeju common ranch. Through logistic regression, some factors were turned out to be related to resilience of the community. The results showed that ‘Ranch supporting’; ‘type of management’; ‘village community’; ratio of population to village area’ had comparably high correlation with resilience (here, existence) of common ranch.

This study demonstrates that fragmentary factors can be an indicator of community resilience when comprehended its meaning. Moreover, it enlightened that community resilience could determine future ecological condition of the system. It can be a preliminary study of liking up community factors to community resilience and social-ecological resilience by extension.