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Folke, C., S. R. Carpenter, B. Walker, M. Scheffer, T. Chapin, and J. Rockström. 2010. Resilience thinking:
integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society 15(4): 20. [online] URL:
http://
www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art20/
Insight
Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and
Transformability
Carl Folke 1,2, Stephen R. Carpenter 3, Brian Walker 1,4, Marten Scheffer 5, Terry Chapin 6, and
Johan Rockström 1,7
ABSTRACT. Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social–ecological
systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects
interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change
and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. Adaptability is part of resilience. It represents the capacity
to adjust responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for development
along the current trajectory (stability domain). Transformability is the capacity to cross thresholds into new
development trajectories. Transformational change at smaller scales enables resilience at larger scales. The
capacity to transform at smaller scales draws on resilience from multiple scales, making use of crises as
windows of opportunity for novelty and innovation, and recombining sources of experience and knowledge
to navigate social–ecological transitions. Society must seriously consider ways to foster resilience of smaller
more manageable SESs that contribute to Earth System resilience and to explore options for deliberate
transformation of SESs that threaten Earth System resilience.
Key Words: adaptability; adaptation; resilience; social-ecological systems; transformability;
transformation
INTRODUCTION
One of the most cited papers in Ecology and Society
was written to exposit the relationships among
resilience, adaptability and transformability
(Walker et al. 2004). That paper defined resilience
as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance
and reorganize while undergoing change so as to
still retain essentially the same function, structure,
identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004:4).
Discussions since publication of that paper have
exposed some confusion about the use of the term
resilience. The idea that adaptation and
transformation may be essential to maintain
resilience may at first glance seem counterintuitive,
as it embraces change as a requisite to persist. Yet
the very dynamics between periods of abrupt and
gradual change and the capacity to adapt and
transform for persistence are at the core of the
resilience of social–ecological systems (SESs). We
therefore strive to develop a theoretical framework
for understanding what drives SESs, centered
around the idea of resilience. We term this
framework resilience thinking. Here we rephrase
the three core elements of resilience thinking to
embrace these ideas.
RESILIENCE: THE HISTORY OF A
CONCEPT
Resilience was originally introduced by Holling
(1973) as a concept to help understand the capacity
of ecosystems with alternative attractors to persist
in the original state subject to perturbations, as
reviewed by e.g. Gunderson (2000), Folke (2006)
and Scheffer (2009). In some fields the term
resilience has been technically used in a narrow
sense to refer to the return rate to equilibrium upon
a perturbation (called engineering resilience by
Holling in 1996). However, many complex systems
1Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, 2Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 3Center for
Limnology, University of Wisconsin, 4CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, 5Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group, Wageningen Agricultural
University, 6Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 7Stockholm Environment Institute
Ecology and Society 15(4): 20
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have multiple attractors. This implies that a
perturbation can bring the system over a threshold
that marks the limit of the basin of attraction or
stability domain of the original state, causing the
system to be attracted to a contrasting state. This is
qualitatively different from returning to the original
state, and Holling’s (1996) definition of ecological
or ecosystem resilience has been instrumental to
emphasize this difference.
The concept of alternative stable states with clear-
cut basins of attraction is a highly simplified image
of reality in ecosystems. Attractors may be stable
points or more complicated cycles of various kinds.
Intrinsic tendencies to produce cyclic or chaotic
dynamics are blended in intricate ways with the
effects of environmental stochasticity, and with
trends that cause thresholds as well as the nature of
attractors to change over time. Nonetheless, we
observe sharp shifts in ecosystems that stand out of
the blur of fluctuations around trends. Such shifts
are called regime shifts and may have different
causes (Scheffer et al. 2001, Carpenter 2003). When
they correspond to a shift between different stability
domains they are referred to as critical transitions
(Scheffer 2009). All of these concepts have precise
definitions in the mathematics of dynamical systems
(Kuznetsov 1998, Scheffer 2009).
However, despite their elegance and rigor, they
capture only part of reality. One of the main
limitations of the dynamical systems theory that
forms the broader underlying framework is that it
does not easily account for the fact that the very
nature of systems may change over time (Scheffer
2009). This implies that, in order to understand the
dynamics of an intertwined social–ecological
system (SES), other concepts are needed.
In many disciplines, human actions are often viewed
as external drivers of ecosystem dynamics;
examples include fishing, water harvesting, and
polluting. Through such a lens the manager is an
external intervener in ecosystem resilience. There
are those who suggest constraining the use of the
resilience concept to ecosystem resilience, for
conceptual clarity, as the basis for practical
application of resilience within ecological science
and ecosystem management (e.g. Brand and Jax
2007). However, many of the serious, recurring
problems in natural resource use and management
stem precisely from the lack of recognition that
ecosystems and the social systems that use and
depend on them are inextricably linked. It is the
feedback loops among them, as interdependent
social–ecological systems, that determine their
overall dynamics.
ADAPTABILITY AND
TRANSFORMABILITY AS
PREREQUISITES FOR SES RESILIENCE
Social–ecological resilience is about people and
nature as interdependent systems. This is true for
local communities and their surrounding ecosystems,
but the great acceleration of human activities on
earth now also makes it an issue at global scales
(Steffen et al. 2007), making it difficult and even
irrational to continue to separate the ecological and
social and to try to explain them independently, even
for analytical purposes. To put the issue in context,
ice core data reveal that humanity has for the last
10,000 years lived in a relatively stable climate, an
era referred to as the Holocene. This era has allowed
agriculture and all major human civilizations to
develop and flourish. The future of human well-
being may be seriously compromised if we should
pass a critical threshold that tips the earth system
out of this stability domain (Rockström et al. 2009).
It is plausible that current development paradigms
and patterns, if continued, would tip the integrated
human–earth system into a radically different basin
of attraction (Steffen et al. 2007). Preventing such
an undesired critical transition will require
innovation and novelty. Profound change in society
is likely to be required for persistence in the
Holocene stability domain. Alas, resilience of
behavioral patterns in society is notoriously large
and a serious impediment for preventing loss of
Earth System resilience. SES resilience that
contributes to Earth System resilience is needed to
remain in the Holocene state.
It should be immediately clear from this example
that social change is essential for SES resilience.
This is why we incorporate adaptability and the
more radical concept of transformability as key
ingredients of resilience thinking (Table 1).
Adaptability captures the capacity of a SES to learn,
combine experience and knowledge, adjust its
responses to changing external drivers and internal
processes, and continue developing within the
current stability domain or basin of attraction
(Berkes et al. 2003). Adaptability has been defined
as “the capacity of actors in a system to influence
resilience” (Walker et al. 2004:5). Thus, adaptive
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Table 1. Glossary of resilience terms.
Term Definition
Active transformation The deliberate initiation of a phased introduction of one or more new state variables (a new way
of making a living) at lower scales, while maintaining the resilience of the system at higher
scales as transformational change proceeds.
Adaptability (adaptive
capacity) The capacity of actors in a system to influence resilience.
Adaptive cycle A heuristic model that portrays an endogenously driven four-phase cycle of social-ecological
systems and other complex adaptive systems. The common trajectory is from a phase of rapid
growth where resources are freely available and there is high resilience (r phase), through
capital accumulation into a gradually rigidifying phase where most resources are locked up and
there is little flexibility or novelty, and low resilience (K phase), thence via a sudden collapse
into a release phase of chaotic dynamics in which relationships and structures are undone (Ω),
into a phase of re-organization where novelty can prevail (α). The r-K dynamics reflect a more-
or-less predictable, relatively slow “foreloop” and the Ω - α dynamics represent a chaotic, fast
“backloop” that strongly influences the nature of the next foreloop. External or higher-scale
influences can cause a move from any phase to any other phase.
Forced transformation An imposed transformation of a social–ecological system that is not introduced deliberately by
the actors.
General resilience The resilience of any and all parts of a system to all kinds of shocks, including novel ones.
Panarchy The interactive dynamics of a nested set of adaptive cycles.
Regime The set of system states within a stability landscape
Regime shift A change in a system state from one regime or stability domain to another
Resilience The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as
to still retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks, and therefore identity, that
is, the capacity to change in order to maintain the same identity.
Social–ecological system Integrated system of ecosystems and human society with reciprocal feedback and
interdependence. The concept emphasizes the humans-in-nature perspective
Specified resilience The resilience “of what, to what”; resilience of some particular part of a system, related to a
particular control variable, to one or more identified kinds of shocks.
Stability domain A basin of attraction of a system, in which the dimensions are defined by the set of controlling
variables that have threshold levels (equivalent to a system regime)
Stability landscape The extent of the possible states of system space, defined by the set of control variables in
which stability domains are embedded
Threshold (aka critical
transition) A level or amount of a controlling, often slowly changing variable in which a change occurs in
a critical feedback causing the system to self-organize along a different trajectory, that is,
towards a different attractor.
Transformability The capacity to transform the stability landscape itself in order to become a different kind of
system, to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures
make the existing system untenable.
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capacity maintains certain processes despite
changing internal demands and external forces on
the SES (Carpenter and Brock 2008). By contrast,
transformability has been defined as “the capacity
to create a fundamentally new system when
ecological, economic, or social structures make the
existing system untenable” (Walker et al. 2004:5).
Extending the use of resilience to social–ecological
systems makes it possible to explicitly deal with
issues raised by Holling (1986) about renewal,
novelty, innovation and reorganization in system
development and how they interact across scales
(Gunderson and Holling 2002). This is an exciting
area of explorative work broadening the scope from
adaptive management of ecosystem feedbacks to
understanding and accounting for the social
dimension that creates barriers or bridges for
ecosystem stewardship of dynamic landscapes and
seascapes in times of change (Gunderson et al.
1995). Are there deeper, slower variables in social
systems, such as identity, core values, and
worldviews that constrain adaptability? In addition,
what are the features of agency, actor groups, social
learning, networks, organizations, institutions,
governance structures, incentives, political and
power relations or ethics that enhance or undermine
social–ecological resilience (Folke et al. 2005,
Chapin et al. 2006, Smith and Stirling 2010)? How
can we assess social–ecological thresholds and
regime shifts and what governance challenges do
they imply (Norberg and Cumming 2008, Biggs et
al. 2009)?
Similarly, it helps to broaden the social domain from
investigating human action in relation to a certain
natural resource, like dairy or fruit production, or
environmental issue, like climate change, to the
challenge of multilevel collaborative societal
responses to a broader set of feedbacks and
thresholds in social–ecological systems (Chapin et
al. 2009). For example, governance of the
Goulburn-Broken catchment in the Murray Darling
Basin, Australia has had to solve problems, adapting
to change while continuing to develop, connecting
the region to global markets. Dryland cropping,
grazing, irrigated dairy and fruit production is
widespread and the catchment produces one quarter
of the State of Victoria's export earnings (Walker et
al. 2009). At a first glance, economically lucrative
activities seem to be thriving. But if the analysis is
broadened to a social–ecological approach to
account for the capacity of the landscape in
sustaining the values of the region, the picture looks
quite different. Widespread clearing of native
vegetation and high levels of water use for irrigation
have resulted in rising water tables, creating severe
salinization problems; so severe that the region
faces serious social–ecological thresholds with
possible knock-on effects between them. Crossing
such thresholds may result in irreversible changes
in the region (Walker et al. 2009). Hence, strategies
for adaptability that are socially desirable may lead
to vulnerable social–ecological systems and
persistent undesirable states such as poverty traps
or rigidity traps (Scheffer 2009). Will the
adaptability among people and governance of the
Goulburn-Broken catchment be sufficient to deal
with environmental change, like salinization and
interacting thresholds, and avoid being pushed into
a poverty trap, or does the social–ecological system
need to transform into a new stability landscape,
forcing people to change deep values and identity
(Walker et al. 2009)?
SPECIFIED AND GENERAL RESILIENCE
In practice, resilience is sometimes applied to
problems relating to particular aspects of a system
that might arise from a particular set of sources or
shocks. We refer to this as specified resilience. In
other cases, the manager is concerned more about
resilience to all kinds of shocks, including
completely novel ones. We refer to this as general
resilience.
In social–ecological systems, specified resilience
arises in response to the question “resilience of what,
to what?” (Carpenter et al. 2001). However, there
is a danger in becoming too focused on specified
resilience because increasing resilience of particular
parts of a system to specific disturbances may cause
the system to lose resilience in other ways (Cifdaloz
et al. 2010). This is illustrated by the HOT (highly
optimized tolerance) theory (Carson and Doyle
2000), which shows how systems that become very
robust to frequent kinds of disturbance necessarily
become fragile in relation to infrequent kinds. For
example, international travel in Europe became
increasingly focused on improving and elaborating
air travel, with less emphasis on international
ground and water transportation. The Icelandic
volcano of 2010 exposed the low resilience of this
travel system to an extensive cloud of airborne ash
that interfered with the operation of passenger jets.
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General resilience, in contrast, does not define either
the part of the system that might cross a threshold,
or the kinds of shocks the system has to endure. It
is about coping with uncertainty in all ways. The
distinction is important, because our experience in
working with groups who are interested in using a
resilience approach suggests that they tend to focus
on specified resilience, and in doing so they may be
narrowing options for dealing with novel shocks and
even increasing the likelihood of new kinds of
instability. Recognizing that efforts to foster
specified resilience will not necessarily avoid a
regime shift is a first step to understanding the need
for transformational change. Getting beyond the
state of denial, particularly in SESs with strong
identity or cultural beliefs, is not easy and often
requires a shock or at least a perceived crisis.
Resilience thinking suggests that such events may
open up opportunities for reevaluating the current
situation, trigger social mobilization, recombine
sources of experience and knowledge for learning,
and spark novelty and innovation. It may lead to
new kinds of adaptability or possibly to
transformational change.
MULTISCALE RESILIENCE AND
TRANSFORMABILITY
As defined in Walker et al. (2004), transformational
change involves a change in the nature of the
stability landscape, introducing new defining state
variables and losing others, as when a household
adopts a new direction in making a living or when
a region moves from an agrarian to a resource-
extraction economy. It can be a deliberate process,
initiated by the people involved, or it can be forced
on them by changing environmental or
socioeconomic conditions. Whether transformation
is deliberate or forced depends on the level of
transformability in the SES concerned.
The attributes of transformability have much in
common with those of general resilience, including
high levels of all forms of capital, diversity in
landscapes and seascapes and of institutions, actor
groups, and networks, learning platforms, collective
action, and support from higher scales in the
governance structure. Transformational change
often involves shifts in perception and meaning,
social network configurations, patterns of
interactions among actors including leadership and
political and power relations, and associated
organizational and institutional arrangements (e.g.
Folke et al. 2009, Huitema and Meijerink 2009,
Smith and Stirling 2010).
Deliberate transformational change can be initiated
at multiple scales, and perhaps gradually, as
suggested by recent experience with applying
resilience thinking to catchment planning and
management in SE Australia (Walker et al. 2009).
Deliberate transformational change at the scale of
the whole catchment, of all the component parts at
the same time, is likely to be too costly, undesirable
or socially unacceptable. Transformational changes
at lower scales, in a sequential way, can lead to
feedback effects at the catchment scale, which is a
learning process, and facilitate eventual catchment-
scale transformational change. Actors and
organizations that bridge the local to higher social–
ecological scales are often involved in such
processes (Olsson et al. 2004).
Forced transformation, however, is likely to occur
at scales larger than the scale of the management
focus and therefore be beyond the influence of local
actors. Changes in regional tax structures, for
example, may precipitate transformations from
farming to suburbanization. Loss of summer sea ice
may transform the geopolitical and economic
feedbacks among Arctic nations. Systems with high
transformative capacity may deliberately initiate
transformational changes that shape the outcomes
of forced transformations occurring at larger scales.
Transformation trajectories are the subject of a
growing literature (Gunderson and Holling 2002,
Buchanan et al. 2005, Geels and Kemp 2006, Chapin
et al. 2010), A resilience perspective emphasizes an
adaptive approach, facilitating different transformative
experiments at small scales and allowing cross-
learning and new initiatives to emerge, constrained
only by avoiding trajectories that the SES does not
wish to follow, especially those with known or
suspected thresholds. The first part of this process
is much the same as that proposed in the socio-
technical transitions literature, which encourages
arenas for safe experimentation (e.g. Loorbach
2007, Fischer-Kowalski and Rotmans 2009).
However, where the transition model then
determines the new goal and adopts a particular
process for reaching it, a resilience approach would
allow the new identity of the SES to emerge through
interactions within and across scales.
For example, declining agricultural productivity in
several Latin American countries due to land
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degradation reached an unsustainable level in the
1970s. This breakdown prompted some farmers to
start experimenting with unconventional methods
for land management, in particular low-till
alternatives to plowing that enhanced soil organic
matter and fertility (Derpsch and Friedrich 2009).
Responses to the land productivity crisis and
subsequent social crisis of deteriorated livelihoods
were first pursued by individual farmers and
researchers in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina.
Experimentation with new innovative breakthroughs
in technologies were necessary, as the shift from
then-dominant methods to no-tillage required major
changes in land management practices, such as
weed management, mulch-farming and green
manuring techniques, as well as new machines for
direct planting. The experimental learning approach
at small scales, with processes for emergence and
cross-scale learning, caused a transformation of the
whole farming system. Currently, more than 25
million ha of agricultural land is under no-tillage in
Brazil alone, and in Latin America the transition
from conventional plow-based agriculture to no-till
systems has reached a scale where one can talk of
an agrarian revolution or a social–ecological
transformation (Fowler and Rockström 2001).
Case studies of SESs suggest that transformations
consist of three phases: being prepared for or even
preparing the social–ecological systems for change,
navigating the transition by making use of a crisis
as a window of opportunity for change, and building
resilience of the new social–ecological regime
(Olsson et al. 2004, Chapin et al. 2010). Such
transformations are never scale-independent, but
draw on social–ecological sources of resilience
across scales (Gunderson and Holling 2002). For
example, at the Great Barrier Reef a governance
transformation across multiple levels of natural
resource management took place from protection of
selected individual reefs to stewardship of the large-
scale seascape. The transformation was triggered by
a sense of urgency induced by threats to the reef of
terrestrial runoff, overharvesting, and global
warming. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park
Authority was crucial in the transformation and
provided leadership throughout the process.
Strategies involved internal reorganization and
management innovation, leading to an ability to
coordinate the scientific community, to increase
public awareness of environmental issues and
problems, to involve a broader set of stakeholders,
and to maneuver the political system for support at
critical times (Olsson et al. 2008).
Multiscale resilience is fundamental for understanding
the interplay between persistence and change,
adaptability and transformability. Without the scale
dimension, resilience and transformation may seem
to be in stark contrast or even conflict. Confusion
arises when resilience is interpreted as backward
looking, assumed to prevent novelty, innovation and
transitions to new development pathways. This
interpretation seems to be more about robustness to
change and not about resilience for transformation.
The resilience framework broadens the description
of resilience beyond its meaning as a buffer for
conserving what you have and recovering to what
you were. Beyond this concept of persistence,
resilience thinking incorporates the dynamic
interplay of persistence, adaptability and transformability
across multiple scales and multiple attractors in
SESs. Fruitful avenues of inquiry include the
existence of potential thresholds and regime shifts
in SESs and the challenges that this implies;
adaptability of SESs to deal with such challenges,
including uncertainty and surprise; and the ability
to steer away from undesirable attractors, innovate
and possibly transform SESs into trajectories that
sustain and enhance ecosystem services, societal
development and human well-being.
CONCLUSIONS
In a nutshell, resilience thinking focuses on three
aspects of social–ecological systems (SES):
resilience as persistence, adaptability and
transformability. Resilience is the tendency of a SES
subject to change to remain within a stability
domain, continually changing and adapting yet
remaining within critical thresholds. Adaptability is
a part of resilience. Adaptability is the capacity of
a SES to adjust its responses to changing external
drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for
development within the current stability domain,
along the current trajectory. Transformability is the
capacity to create new stability domains for
development, a new stability landscape, and cross
thresholds into a new development trajectory.
Deliberate transformation requires resilience
thinking, first in assessing the relative merits of the
current versus alternative, potentially more
Ecology and Society 15(4): 20
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favorable stability domains, and second in fostering
resilience of the new development trajectory, the
new basin of attraction.
Transformations do not take place in a vacuum, but
draw on resilience from multiple scales, making use
of crises as windows of opportunity, and
recombining sources of experience and knowledge
to navigate social–ecological transitions from a
regime in one stability landscape to another.
Transformation involves novelty and innovation.
Transformational change at smaller scales enables
resilience at larger scales, while the capacity to
transform at smaller scales draws on resilience at
other scales. Thus, deliberate transformation
involves breaking down the resilience of the old and
building the resilience of the new. As the Earth
System approaches or exceeds thresholds that might
precipitate a forced transformation to some state
outside its Holocene stability domain, society must
seriously consider ways to foster more flexible
systems that contribute to Earth System resilience
and to explore options for the deliberate
transformation of systems that threaten Earth
System resilience.
Responses to this article can be read online at:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art20/
responses/
Acknowledgments:
We acknowledge the volcanic eruption at the
Eyjafjalla Glacier, Iceland for extending the stay in
Stockholm of some of the co-authors and enabling
the completion of the paper. Support for the work to
the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Beijer
Institute was provided by Mistra, Formas and Kjell
and Märta Beijer Foundation.
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