Spending three years in Scotland highlighted how a community’s approach to green spaces reveals broader pressures like funding limits, climate adaptation, and changing demographics. Transitional vulnerability—fragility during uncertain change—emerges not from single shocks, but from compounded, ambiguous challenges. Research finds poorer areas suffer most when maintenance declines, impacting those most reliant on free public space. Yet, targeted local actions, as described by Prigogine, can shift broader system outcomes. The crucial task for leaders is structuring community capacity during transitions, treating green spaces as essential investments to foster resilience rather than expendable luxuries.
Three years in Scotland taught me this: observe how a community cares for its green spaces as a lens for understanding pressures. They juggle many competing demands, funding constraints, climate change adaptation, volunteer recruitment, council relationships, and meaningful community involvement.
This short post is a reflection on the transitional vulnerability today between communities and green parks (and some photos taken in Scotland over the year).
Why Transitions Break Things
These familiar systems can crumble slowly if replacements/solutions haven't solidified yet. When communities hang suspended between what was and what could be. Here lies transitional vulnerability.
Most organisational thinking defaults to two extremes: stability or crisis, steady state or emergency. But the real breaking point often lies in the in-between—that liminal space where systems and people fracture not from catastrophe, but from prolonged ambiguity.
When community green spaces navigate governance transitions, funding models shift, climate pressures mount, and demographic change accelerates, all simultaneously, systems fracture. Not from single shocks. From compounded uncertainties.
Research on social-ecological systems shows these transition periods create cascading vulnerabilities. Small and many pressures trigger large effects. Maintenance declines. Use drops. Capacity erodes. And suddenly you've crossed an invisible threshold where recovery becomes exponentially more complicated.
The Equity Angle Nobody Talks About
Here's what research actually shows: parks in lower-income communities suffer disproportionately during funding transitions.
Not equally. Disproportionately.
The communities most dependent on free green space face the sharpest maintenance cuts precisely when they need it most. Families with limited resources. Elderly residents. People managing health challenges through nature access.
Yet these are the populations most exposed when transitional vulnerability hits, because their options are minimal.
The Prigogine Principle: How Small Changes Shift Systems
Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine observed something elegant about complex systems: "Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order."
This is counterintuitive. It suggests that in transitional moments, focused local action doesn't just help locally, it can redirect the entire system trajectory.
Community mobilisation. Networked partnerships. Distributed leadership. They're pressure points where complex systems need to respond (islands in a complex environment).
Three years in Scotland taught me this: observe how a community cares for its green spaces as a lens for understanding pressures. They juggle many competing demands, funding constraints, climate change adaptation, volunteer recruitment, council relationships, and meaningful community involvement.
This short post is a reflection on the transitional vulnerability today between communities and green parks (and some photos taken in Scotland over the year).
Why Transitions Break Things
These familiar systems can crumble slowly if replacements/solutions haven't solidified yet. When communities hang suspended between what was and what could be. Here lies transitional vulnerability.
Most organisational thinking defaults to two extremes: stability or crisis, steady state or emergency. But the real breaking point often lies in the in-between—that liminal space where systems and people fracture not from catastrophe, but from prolonged ambiguity.
When community green spaces navigate governance transitions, funding models shift, climate pressures mount, and demographic change accelerates, all simultaneously, systems fracture. Not from single shocks. From compounded uncertainties.
Research on social-ecological systems shows these transition periods create cascading vulnerabilities. Small and many pressures trigger large effects. Maintenance declines. Use drops. Capacity erodes. And suddenly you've crossed an invisible threshold where recovery becomes exponentially more complicated.
The Equity Angle Nobody Talks About
Here's what research actually shows: parks in lower-income communities suffer disproportionately during funding transitions.
Not equally. Disproportionately.
The communities most dependent on free green space face the sharpest maintenance cuts precisely when they need it most. Families with limited resources. Elderly residents. People managing health challenges through nature access.
Yet these are the populations most exposed when transitional vulnerability hits, because their options are minimal.
The Prigogine Principle: How Small Changes Shift Systems
Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine observed something elegant about complex systems: "Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order."
This is counterintuitive. It suggests that in transitional moments, focused local action doesn't just help locally, it can redirect the entire system trajectory.
Community mobilisation. Networked partnerships. Distributed leadership. They're pressure points where complex systems need to respond (islands in a complex environment).
Murray Park, Alford, Summer
Transitions as Choice Points
Here's what matters for leaders, managers, and anyone stewarding shared resources:
Transitions aren't inevitable outcomes. They're ongoing choice points. How you structure capacity during transition, centralised versus distributed, single-point dependent versus networked, and reactive versus anticipatory, determines what emerges on the other side.
Will you treat green infrastructure as a luxury that shrinks when budgets tighten? Or as resilience capital warranting investment precisely when communities face uncertainty and need a sanctuary?
Murray Park, Alford, Winter
Will you concentrate on expertise in individuals and institutions? Or distribute it across networks that survive disruption?
The Real Question
The question isn't whether your community will navigate transition. It's whether they can build distributed resilience during the transition. This could be the difference between systems that adapt and systems that fracture.
#CommunityResilience #SocialEcology #GreenInfrastructure #Scotland #TransitionalVulnerability