Resilience (Republished)

Abstract

Resilience thinking in relation to the environment has emerged as a lens of inquiry that serves a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. Resilience is about cultivating the capacity to sustain development in the face of expected and surprising change and diverse pathways of development and potential thresholds between them. The evolution of resilience thinking is coupled to social-ecological systems and a truly intertwined human-environment planet. Resilience as persistence, adaptability, and transformability of complex adaptive social-ecological systems is the focus, clarifying the dynamic and forward-looking nature of the concept. Resilience thinking emphasizes that social-ecological systems, from the individual, to community, to society as a whole, are embedded in the biosphere. The biosphere connection is an essential observation if sustainability is to be taken seriously. In the continuous advancement of resilience thinking there are efforts aimed at capturing resilience of social-ecological systems and finding ways for people and institutions to govern social-ecological dynamics for improved human well-being, at the local, across levels and scales, to the global. Consequently, in resilience thinking, development issues for human well-being, for people and planet, are framed in a context of understanding and governing complex social-ecological dynamics for sustainability as part of a dynamic biosphere.
This invited article is a republication of Folke, C. 2016. "Resilience" of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.8)

Full text

Copyright © 2016 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance.
Folke, C. 2016. Resilience (Republished). Ecology and Society 21(4):44. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09088-210444
Invited Manuscripts
Resilience (Republished)
Carl Folke 1,2
ABSTRACT.
Resilience thinking in relation to the environment has emerged as a lens of inquiry that serves a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue
and collaboration. Resilience is about cultivating the capacity to sustain development in the face of expected and surprising change
and diverse pathways of development and potential thresholds between them. The evolution of resilience thinking is coupled to social-
ecological systems and a truly intertwined human-environment planet. Resilience as persistence, adaptability, and transformability of
complex adaptive social-ecological systems is the focus, clarifying the dynamic and forward-looking nature of the concept. Resilience
thinking emphasizes that social-ecological systems, from the individual, to community, to society as a whole, are embedded in the
biosphere. The biosphere connection is an essential observation if sustainability is to be taken seriously. In the continuous advancement
of resilience thinking there are efforts aimed at capturing resilience of social-ecological systems and finding ways for people and
institutions to govern social-ecological dynamics for improved human well-being, at the local, across levels and scales, to the global.
Consequently, in resilience thinking, development issues for human well-being, for people and planet, are framed in a context of
understanding and governing complex social-ecological dynamics for sustainability as part of a dynamic biosphere.
This invited article is a republication of Folke, C. 2016. “Resilience” of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.8)
Key Words: development; resilience; social-ecological; sustainability; transformation
INTRODUCTION
The last fifteen years have seen an explosion of resilience research.
The number of scientific publications on resilience in relation to
the environment has during this period increased from some 250
to well over 6000 publications. The annual citations have jumped
from less than 100 in year 1995 to more than 20,000 citations in
2015 (ISI Web of Science December 2015). A search on resilience
and the environment at Google Scholar presents over one million
hits (February 2016). Resilience is a concept and lens found in
many academic fields and disciplines. Resilience has become part
of practice, policy, and business, ranging from poverty alleviation
to political frameworks and business strategies to anticipate and
respond to change and crisis, not only to survive, but also to evolve.
Resilience is widely spread.
I was invited to contribute an article on this vibrant research field
for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science.
The work with the article provided a welcoming opportunity to
reflect on the state-of-the-art of resilience thinking 10 years after
the review that Elinor Ostrom and Marco Janssen invited me to
write for Global Environmental Change (Folke 2006). After
submission to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Environmental Science, the contribution was shared with
colleagues for comments and reflections. Several colleagues
strongly recommended that it would be very valuable to have the
Encyclopedia article also appearing as a journal article in open-
access format offering the work to a broader readership. I turned
to Oxford University Press and asked about their views. They were
very positive about having selected articles of the Oxford Research
Encyclopedias, like this one, reprinted in scientific journals. My
coeditor-in-Chief Lance Gunderson argued for Ecology and
Society as the natural venue, because resilience is one of the core
concepts of the journal and persuasively encouraged me to
proceed.
To make it clear, this invited article is a reproduction of the article
“Resilience” published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Environmental Science (Folke 2016). The only major difference
is the new introduction and a reference list in line with Ecology
and Society. Permission to republish the article in Ecology and
Society has been granted by Oxford University Press USA.
The focus of the article is on resilience and the environment in
relation to development and in particular on the evolution and
spread of resilience thinking in this context (e.g., Walker and Salt
2006). The article opens with a section on “what is resilience?”
that reports on early work on resilience and the environment, as
well as the current definition of resilience in resilience thinking.
The following section connects resilience with social-ecological
systems in the context of sustainability science and complex
adaptive systems raising issues like “resilience of people or planet
in development?” The next section is about social-ecological
resilience and the Anthropocene, which embraces issues on how
to capture resilience, resilience in stewardship, and the significance
of expecting the unexpected as well as enhancing resilience in
general for the unknown and unknowable.
Resilience thinking emerged from the discovery, based on
observation, that living systems have multiple basins of attraction
(Holling 1973). It has developed into an approach for
understanding complex adaptive systems and serves as a platform
for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research with an
emphasis on social-ecological systems (e.g., Levin et al. 2013).
1Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden, 2Beijer Institute, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sweden

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Social-ecological systems are intertwined systems of people and
nature embedded in the biosphere, the thin, fragile layer of life
around planet Earth (e.g., Folke et al. 2011). The biosphere
connection is a central observation that has to be visible in work
on resilience and social-ecological systems if sustainability is to
be taken seriously.
WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
In some fields the term resilience has been used in a narrow sense
to refer to the return rate to equilibrium upon a perturbation.
Others tend to interpret resilience as bouncing-back after
disturbance or recovery time, or recovery to what you were before
in more general terms. In this way of looking at the world there
is often an implicit focus on trying to resist change and control it
to maintain stability. The resilience approach of resilience
thinking is much richer. It deals with complex adaptive system
dynamics and true uncertainty and how to learn to live with
change and make use of it. Resilience thinking is the focus of this
article.
In popular terms, resilience is having the capacity to persist in the
face of change, to continue to develop with ever changing
environments. Resilience thinking is about how periods of gradual
changes interact with abrupt changes, and the capacity of people,
communities, societies, cultures to adapt or even transform into
new development pathways in the face of dynamic change. It is
about how to navigate the journey in relation to diverse pathways,
and thresholds and tipping points between them. In resilience
thinking, adaptation refers to human actions that sustain
development on current pathways, while transformation is about
shifting development into other emergent pathways and even
creating new ones.
Deliberate transformation involves breaking down the specific
resilience of the old and building the resilience of the new (Folke
et al. 2010). Specified resilience concerns resilience of what to
what (Carpenter et al. 2001) and also for whom (Lebel et al. 2006,
Robards et al. 2011, Brown 2014). General resilience is for the
unknown and the unknowable (Kates and Clark 1996, Peterson
et al. 2003a, Polasky et al. 2011a), for having the capacity to deal
with complexity, uncertainty, and surprise (Walker et al. 2009a,
Biggs et al. 2012a, Carpenter et al. 2012a). General resilience
provides sources of memory, flexibility, options, and innovations
for transformation and can help turn a crisis into an opportunity
(e.g., Gunderson and Holling 2002, Nykvist and von Heland
2014).
Early work on resilience and the environment
Resilience as a concept in relation to the environment, or more
specifically to ecosystems, was proposed by Holling (1973) as a
way to understand the capacity of ecosystems to absorb change
(reviewed by, e.g., Gunderson 2000, Desjardins et al. 2015) or
more specifically, how to persist developing in the original state
subject to disturbances and changing conditions (Holling 1973).
Holling introduced resilience in the context of multiple stability
domains or multiple basins of attraction in ecosystems, a radical
idea at that time (Folke 2006). His discovery of multiple basins
of attraction in ecosystem dynamics challenged the, at that time,
dominant stable-equilibrium view of ecosystems. He investigated
how ecosystems relate to random events and heterogeneity of
temporal and spatial scales and defined resilience as persistence
of relationships within a system, as a measure of the ability of
systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables,
and parameters, and still persist (Holling 1973).
The early days of resilience thinking draw on empirical
observations of ecosystem dynamics often interpreted in
mathematical models. Hence, inductive observations and
empirical work led to the formulation of resilience as a feature of
dynamic systems. Classic early work includes, for example,
Ludwig et al. (1978), Walker et al. (1981), some of which are
compiled in Gunderson et al. (2009). The pioneering
interdisciplinary volume Sustainable Development of the
Biosphere, edited by Clark and Munn (1986) included Holling’s
(1986) classic chapter developing the theoretical basis for
resilience dynamics emerging from the comparison of the
ecosystem studies. In that chapter, the adaptive cycle of system
development was introduced.
The multibasins of attraction and resilience as the science of
surprise became the theoretical foundation for the work with
active adaptive management of ecosystems where Buzz Holling,
Carl Walters, Bill Clark, and colleagues mobilized a series of
studies of large scale ecosystems subject to management (Holling
and Chambers 1973, Holling 1978, Walters and Hilborn 1978,
Clark et al. 1979, Walters 1986, Walters and Holling 1990). The
adaptive management process allowed for comparative analyses
of the theoretical foundations of ecosystems behavior and
ecosystems management. The conceptual underpinnings of
adaptive management are simple; there will always be inherent
uncertainty and unpredictability in the dynamics and behavior of
complex systems, as a result of nonlinear interactions among
components and emergence, yet management decisions must still
be made, and whenever possible, learning should be incorporated
into management (e.g. Allen et al. 2011). The resilience approach
began early to influence work and discussions in fields outside
ecology like anthropology, ecological economics, environmental
psychology, human geography, the management literature, and
others (reviewed in, e.g., Scoones 1999, Abel and Stepp 2003,
Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003, Folke 2006).
The Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
was restarted in 1991 with a focus on the interface of ecology and
economy. In the diverse research programs of the Institute,
resilience appeared and reappeared as a central feature for
understanding complex system dynamics (e.g., Costanza et al.
1993). The volume Biodiversity Loss (Perrings et al. 1995)
presented an ecological primer on functional diversity, regime
shifts, and ecosystem services in an ecosystem resilience and cross-
scale context (Holling et al. 1995, see also Folke et al. 1996,
Peterson et al. 1998, Nyström et al. 2000, Elmqvist et al. 2003,
Lundberg and Moberg 2003, Hughes et al. 2007). Several papers
as part of the Biodiversity Program (e.g., Perrings et al. 1992,
Gadgil et al. 1993, Hammer et al. 1993, Walker 1993) and a
recognized paper on economic growth (Arrow et al. 1995)
incorporated resilience as a significant feature for human and
environmental interactions (see also Levin et al. 1998). Holling
and colleagues released the innovative book Barrier and Bridges
to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions in 1995 (Gunderson
et al. 1995). The Beijer Institute program property rights and the
performance of natural systems (Hanna et al. 1996) generated the
Berkes and Folke (1998) volume Linking Social and Ecological

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Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for
Building Resilience, one of the first volumes focusing on social-
ecological systems and resilience thinking (e.g., Ostrom 1999,
Curtin and Parker 2014).
As a reflection of the significance of a resilience lens for
understanding complex social-ecological systems, the research
program The Resilience Network was initiated through a
collaboration of the Beijer Institute (Mäler and Folke) and
University of Florida (Holling and Gunderson), a program that
engaged pioneering resilience thinkers and that triggered a lot of
interesting and path-breaking work on resilience including the
rich Panarchy volume (Gunderson and Holling 2002), a volume
on the significance of nonlinear dynamics and regime shifts in
economics, The Economics of Non-Convex Ecosystems (Dasgupta
and Mäler 2004), and the Berkes, Folke, Colding 2003 book
Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for
Complexity and Change emphasizing the challenge of governing
dynamic interactions between gradual and abrupt changes in
social-ecological systems. This book presented a major synthesis
of resilience challenges for social-ecological systems (Folke et al.
2003).
The Resilience Network later developed into the Resilience
Alliance (RA), founded in 1999, with a coherent group of
researchers oriented toward common intellectual goals who
worked together at the fringe of scientific understanding (Parker
and Hackett 2012). The RA has contributed with insights on
resilience in complex social-ecological systems (e.g., Peterson
2000, Janssen 2002, Walker et al. 2006, Norberg and Cumming
2008, Chapin et al. 2009), developed resilience thinking (e.g.,
Carpenter et al. 2001, Folke 2006, Walker and Salt 2006, Nelson
et al. 2007, Quinlan et al. 2015), and also linked it to development
agendas (e.g., Brown 2016). For example, Elinor Ostrom, engaged
on the Beijer Institute Board and later on the Stockholm
Resilience Centre Board, became part of the Resilience Alliance,
inspired by resilience thinking and the work on social-ecological
systems (Ostrom 1999, 2007, 2009). Ostrom’s discussions at the
Beijer Institute with Brian Walker and others on functional
diversity and redundancy in ecosystem dynamics and regime
shifts (e.g., Walker 1992, Peterson et al. 1998, Elmqvist et al. 2003)
inspired her book on institutional diversity (Ostrom 2005).
Major syntheses on resilience and regime shifts in ecosystems were
published (e.g., Scheffer et al. 2001, Carpenter 2003, Bellwood et
al. 2004, Folke et al. 2004). Resilience work expanded from
adaptively managing ecosystems (e.g., Gunderson and Pritchard
2002, Curtin and Parker 2014) to adaptively governing complex
social-ecological systems (e.g., Folke et al. 2005, Armitage et al.
2007, 2009), bringing in the role of institutions, organizations,
networks, and agency in this context (e.g., Adger 2000, Dietz et
al. 2003, Olsson et al. 2004, Galaz 2005, Tompkins 2005, Crona
and Bodin 2006, Lebel et al. 2006, Westley et al. 2006, Berkes
2009, Bodin and Crona 2009), social learning elements and
knowledge systems (e.g., Berkes et al. 2000, Olsson and Folke
2001, Chapin et al. 2006, Fazey et al. 2007, Pahl-Wostl 2007,
Forbes et al. 2009), ancient cultures (e.g., Redman and Kinzig
2003, Hegmon et al. 2008), and political and power dimensions
of sustainability (e.g., Adger et al. 2005a, Gelcich et al. 2006,
Michon 2011).
Now, the resilience concept has spread and this is not the place
to review the large and expanding literature (e.g., Brand and Jax
2007, Janssen 2007, Brown and Westaway 2011, Xu and Marinova
2013, Baggio et al. 2015, Desjardins et al. 2015, Meerow and
Newell 2015, Pu and Qiu 2016), close to an impossible task. But
resilience is influencing the environmental sciences from
agriculture to oceans as well as global environmental and climate
change reflected in, e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) reports (e.g., O’Brien et al. 2012) and in risk and
disaster management (e.g., Berkes 2007, Tidball et al. 2010,
McSweeney and Coomes 2011, Djalante et al. 2013). Resilience
thinking is raised in the development literature and in diverse
ontologies and epistemologies of the social sciences and the
humanities (e.g., Hamel and Välikangas 2003, Redman 2005,
Hegmon et al. 2008, Simmie and Martin 2010, Robards et al.
2011, Crépin et al. 2012, Plieninger and Bieling 2012, Ebbesson
and Hey 2013, Hall and Lamont 2013, Lorenz 2013, Lyon and
Parkins 2013, Barrett and Constas 2014, Chandler 2014, Tidball
2014, Bourbeau 2015, Hobman and Walker 2015, Marston 2015,
Sjöstedt 2015, Weichselgartner and Kelman 2015) and with
diverse reactions from excitement to those that oppose the
approach for diverse reasons (reviewed by, e.g., Brown 2014,
Cretney 2014, Stone-Jovicich 2015).
After all, respect for pluralism (e.g., Norgaard 1989),
epistemological agility (the capacity to work productively across
knowledge domains; McWilliam 2009), and an open mind capable
of moving out of and dynamically modifying one’s preanalytic
vision (e.g., Costanza 2001) are assets with the potential to
augment collective understanding of complex social-ecological
challenges. Attempts to integrate diverse perspectives or
incorporate all dimensions into one unitary approach runs the
risk of undermining the intellectual wealth and dialogues
necessary to meet the challenges of the globally intertwined
Anthropocene (e.g., Bousquet et al. 2015, Arora-Jonsson 2016).
Resilience thinking serves as one useful lens among many to ask
questions, learn, and improve understanding of social-ecological
systems.
Current definition of resilience thinking: integrating resilience,
adaptability, transformability
Resilience reflects the ability of people, communities, societies,
and cultures to live and develop with change, with ever-changing
environments. It is about cultivating the capacity to sustain
development in the face of change, incremental and abrupt,
expected and surprising (Folke 2006). The resilience approach
emphasizes that social-ecological systems need to be managed
and governed for flexibility and emergence rather than for
maintaining stability (e.g., Peterson et al. 2003a, Carpenter et al.
2015a). Hence, resilience, as in focus here, is a dynamic concept
concerned with navigating complexity, uncertainty, and change
across levels and scales (e.g., Berkes et al. 2003, Cash et al. 2006,
Cumming et al. 2013) on a human-dominated planet (e.g.,
Lubchenco 1998, Steffen et al. 2007).
Resilience is about persisting with change on the current path of
development (stability domain or basin of attraction) adapting,
improving, and innovating on that path. It is about having the
capacity to continue to learn, self-organize, and develop in

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dynamic environments faced with true uncertainty and the
unexpected, like steering a vessel in turbulent waters (e.g., Olsson
et al. 2006).
But sometimes navigation leads to induced isolation and
intensification of particular paths and to traps that are difficult to
get out of (e.g., Holling and Meffe 1996, Sterner et al. 2006). The
resilience of the system has become too robust and rigid (e.g.,
Allison and Hobbs 2004, Janssen and Scheffer 2004, Österblom et
al. 2011, Steneck et al. 2011, Cumming et al. 2014). In such
situations the challenge is to reduce or even break resilience of the
current system to enable shifts away from the current pathway(s)
into new ones, into alternative basins of attraction (Carpenter and
Brock 2008, Walker et al. 2009a, Marshall et al. 2012, Enfors 2013).
Sometimes those shifts may be smooth, other times revolutionary.
As resilience declines, it takes progressively smaller disturbances
to push the system into a different regime, or basin of attraction
(Scheffer and Carpenter 2003). Such regime shifts are at the core
of resilience thinking (e.g., Biggs et al. 2012b, Rocha et al. 2015).
Resilience is 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 sustain identity; resilience
is a dynamic concept focusing on how to persist with change
(Walker et al. 2004, Folke et al. 2010), how to evolve with change.
Adaptability refers to human actions that sustain development on
current pathways. Adaptation is a process of deliberate change in
anticipation or in reaction to external stimuli and stress (Nelson
et al. 2007). Adaptation and adaptive capacity of people,
communities, and societies are concepts in use in global
environmental change in general and in climate change in
particular (e.g., Smit and Wandel 2006, Engle 2011, Wise et al.
2014) with overlap with resilience thinking. The adaptability
concept in resilience thinking captures the capacity of people in a
social-ecological system to learn, combine experience and
knowledge, innovate, and adjust responses and institutions to
changing external drivers and internal processes. Adaptability has
been defined as “the capacity of actors in a system to influence
resilience” (Walker et al. 2004) and is about adapting within critical
social-ecological thresholds. Adaptability is central to persistence.
It helps turn changes and surprises into opportunities and, hence,
is an important part of social-ecological resilience (Berkes et al.
2003, Nelson et al. 2007).
Transformability is about shifting development into new pathways
and even creating novel ones. It is about having the ability to cross
thresholds and move social-ecological systems into new basins of
attractions, into new, emergent, and often unknown development
trajectories (e.g., Walker et al. 2009a, Marshall et al. 2012). Such
ability draws on sources of resilience from other levels and scales
than the one in focus for the transformation of the existing system.
Crises can open up space for transformations, for new ways of
thinking and operating. Here, experiences can be revitalized,
recombined for novelty, and help in navigating the arising
transformative opportunities (e.g., Gunderson and Holling 2002,
Folke et al. 2009). 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, Folke et al. 2010).
Transformability and transformation trajectories are the subject
of growing interest (e.g., Future Earth) and literature (e.g., Geels
and Kemp 2006, Loorbach 2007, Chapin et al. 2010, Westley et
al. 2011, Leach et al. 2012, O’Brien et al. 2012, Olsson et al. 2014).
Some scholars see transformation as the consequence of societal
collapse, and others see the capacity to actively transform as an
essential property of long-lasting functioning social-ecological
systems (Feola 2015). There are several different ways of
approaching transformations (e.g., Fischer-Kowalski and
Rotmans 2009, Pelling 2011, Kates et al. 2012, O’Brien 2012, Park
et al. 2012, Moore et al. 2014). All concepts of transformation
recognize that transformative processes are characterized by
discontinuities, thresholds, or tipping points and do not generally
proceed smoothly, and therefore these “cycles” or “phases”
represent attempts to “make sense” (Westley et al. 2006) of the
complex behavior of social-ecological systems rather than strictly
defining features of transformation (Feola 2015).
The resilience approach to transformations is less about planning
and controlling but more about preparing for opportunity or
creating conditions of opportunity for navigating the
transformations (Chapin et al. 2010). The resilience approach
allows the new identity of the social-ecological system to emerge
through interactions of individuals, communities, and societies,
and through their interplay with the biosphere within and across
scales (e.g., Cumming and Collier 2005, Sendzimir et al. 2007,
Folke et al. 2010). It concerns encouraging arenas for safe-to-fail
experimentation, facilitating different transformative experiments
at small scales, and allowing cross-learning and new initiatives to
emerge and spread across levels and scales, constrained only by
avoiding trajectories undesirable from a sustainability
perspective, especially those with known or suspected thresholds
that challenge the capacity of the biosphere to sustain societal
development and human well-being (Westley et al. 2011, Biggs et
al. 2015). Enhancing resilience of the new stability domain is part
of the transformation strategy (Chapin et al. 2010). The
transformability insights of resilience thinking have largely
emerged from case studies of social-ecological systems and
human behavior in the real world (e.g., Olsson et al. 2004, 2006,
2008, Sendzimir et al. 2007, Gelcich et al. 2010, Marshall et al.
2012, Enfors 2013).
Resilience whether for adaptability or transformability operates
and needs to be addressed across levels and scales (Gunderson
and Holling 2002). Shifting pathways or basins of attractions at
one level or scale does not take place in a vacuum. Any
transformation draws on resilience from multiple scales and
diverse sources of actors, organizations, institutions, recombining
experience and knowledge, learning with change, turning crises
into windows of opportunity, and allowing space for or even
governing transformations for innovative pathways in tune with
the resilience of the biosphere (Folke et al. 2003, 2005, 2010).
Hence, in addition to emergence, resilience thinking emphasizes
that humanity is embedded within the biosphere and that any
attempt that takes sustainability seriously will require
sustainability transformations with stewardship that operates in
synergy with the biosphere foundation (Folke et al. 2011).
Sustainability transformations seem to be necessary to achieve a
just society that thrives within planetary boundaries and a
biosphere resilient for humanity (Westley et al. 2011, O’Brien
2012).

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RESILIENCE, COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SOCIAL-
ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS, AND SUSTAINABILITY
SCIENCE
To many, the resilience approach is a subset of sustainability
science (e.g., Anderies et al. 2013, Takeuchi et al. 2014).
Vulnerability research also has strong links to sustainability
science (e.g., Turner et al. 2003a) and there are differences and
similarities with resilience thinking (e.g., Miller et al. 2010, Turner
2010). Sustainability science is defined by the problems it
addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs. A core focus
of sustainability science is on transitions toward sustainability,
including improving society’s capacity to use the earth in ways
that simultaneously meet the needs of a much larger but stabilizing
human population, that sustain the life support systems of the
planet, and that substantially reduce hunger and poverty (Clark
2007, Matson et al. 2016).
Berkes and Folke (1998) started to use the concept of social-
ecological systems as an integrated approach of humans-in-
nature and related the concept to resilience. In this approach the
social refers to the human dimension of people, communities,
societies in its diverse facets (e.g., economic, political,
institutional, cultural) and the ecological to the biosphere, the
thin layer around planet Earth where there is life, human life
included. They pointed out that in the social-ecological approach
the “the delineation between social and natural systems is artificial
and arbitrary” (Berkes and Folke 1998:4). In essence, the social-
ecological approach emphasizes that people, communities,
economies, societies, cultures are embedded parts of the biosphere
and shape ecosystems, from local to global scales, from the past
to the future. At the same time people, communities, economies,
societies, cultures are fundamentally dependent on the capacity
of the biosphere to sustain human development (Folke et al.
2011). It represents a biosphere-based sustainability science with
resilience thinking as a central ingredient.
Baggio et al. (2015) in their citation network analysis of resilience
found that “the social-ecological systems field stands out as an
emerging interdisciplinary arena where resilience can effectively
act as a bridging concept and facilitate a discussion of dynamics
of complex systems within varied contexts, informed by diverse
perspectives, to provide potentially innovative theoretical and
applied insights” (Baggio et al. 2015:8). Biggs et al. (2015) define
resilience of a social-ecological system as the capacity of a social-
ecological system to sustain human well-being in the face of
change, both by buffering shocks but also through adapting or
transforming in response to change.
To understand the dynamics of intertwined social-ecological
systems taking into account that the very nature of systems
changes over time (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2015a), complex adaptive
systems come increasingly into focus (e.g., Holland 1992, Levin
1998, Norberg and Cumming 2008). Social-ecological systems are
complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems possess
critical thresholds, multiple drivers of change, and reciprocal
feedbacks between social and ecological components (Levin et al.
2013).
Resilience and complex adaptive social-ecological systems
Many recurring environmental and natural resource challenges
tend to be reinforced by the lack of recognition that ecosystems
and the social systems that use and depend on them are intimately
linked (Norgaard 1994, van der Leeuw and Aschan-Leygonie
2005, Reyers et al. 2013, Biggs et al. 2015). It is the feedback loops
amongst them, as interdependent social-ecological systems, that
determine their overall dynamics (Folke et al. 2002, 2010, Ostrom
2009, Bots et al. 2015, Carpenter et al. 2015a, Fischer et al. 2015).
And in fact, they have been linked for a long time (e.g., Ellis 2015).
Theoretical and empirical analyses show how intertwined social-
ecological systems are more than the sum of the ecological or the
social or their combination, and provide new explanations to
regime shifts and tipping points (e.g., Liu et al. 2007, Bodin and
Tengö 2012, Lade et al. 2013, 2015, Hentati-Sundberg et al. 2015)
The resilience approach, as part of complex systems
understanding (e.g., Holland 1995, Cillier 2008), emphasizes that
systems of humans and nature exhibit nonlinear dynamics,
thresholds, uncertainty, and surprise, and in particular how
periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change
and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales
(e.g., Gunderson and Holling 2002, Berkes et al. 2003). Complex
systems have multiple attractors and there may be shifts from one
attractor on a certain pathway to a new attractor and a contrasting
pathway (stability domain or basin of attraction). Sharp shifts
take place in ecosystems that stand out of the blur of fluctuations
around trends and may have different causes (e.g., Scheffer and
Carpenter 2003, Scheffer 2009). The likelihood of such shifts
increases with loss of resilience (e.g., Scheffer et al. 2001). During
the last decades it has become clear that human actions cause
such shifts by altering resilience and disturbances (e.g., Folke et
al. 2004, Biggs et al. 2012b, Schoon and Cox 2012) as is now
illustrated from a growing set of examples of both ecosystems
and social-ecological systems (Rocha et al. 2015) and even large-
scale reorganizations like historical shifts from foraging to
farming (Ullaha et al. 2015). The Regime Shifts DataBase
provides examples of different types of regime shifts that have
been documented. The database focuses specifically on regime
shifts that have large impacts on ecosystem services and therefore
on human well-being. Hence, in resilience thinking, social and
ecological systems are intertwined, exhibiting emergent properties
and they can exist in qualitatively different states or basins of
attraction.
Humans as agents in social-ecological systems shape emergent
structures in different ways based on their cultural systems. Geertz
(1973) presents culture as a historically transmitted pattern of
meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions
expressed in symbolic forms by means of which humans
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and
their attitudes toward life. Cultural systems consist of concepts
linked in complicated ways that can form consistent world views,
can contain inconsistencies, and may or may not accurately model
the properties of a social-ecological system. Consequently,
human influence will differ, depending on cultural systems
(Trosper 2005). Deep cultural identities or cultural resilience may
both constrain and be essential for adaptation or transformation
(e.g., Walker et al. 2009a, Rotarangi and Stephenson 2014, von
Heland and Folke 2014). The apparent stability and integrity of
institutions and other social phenomena is not inherent, but an
illusion created by the choice of a scale of observation that is
shorter than the time over which the complex dynamics of the
social-ecological system plays out (van der Leeuw and Aschan-
Leygonie 2005). Humans as agents operate in diverse social and

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cultural contexts that are all an embedded part of the biosphere
and that, consequently, will shape the biosphere in complex and
different ways in continuous coevolution (e.g., Norgaard 1994).
In complex adaptive systems agents interact and connect with
each other often in unpredictable and unplanned ways but from
such interaction broader scale patterns with new properties
emerge, which then feeds back on the system and influences the
interactions of the agents (e.g., Lansing and Kremer 1993, Levin
et al. 2013). Hence, the properties of complex adaptive systems
change because of the interplay between the adaptive responses
of the parts and the emergent properties of the whole that then
feed back to the parts (e.g., Levin et al. 2013). The resilience of
individuals, groups, and communities is tightly coupled to this
interplay and the emergent properties of the whole.
Because complex adaptive systems portray radically disproportional
causation (i.e., small causes do not always produce small effects)
or “nonlinearity,” they may depict periodic and chaotic dynamics,
multiple basins of attraction, and potentially irreversible regime
shifts (e.g., Biggs et al. 2009, 2012b, Norström et al. 2009).
Multiple slow and fast drivers of change make it difficult to
predict when such dramatic changes will occur and to pinpoint
cause-and-effect mechanisms (e.g., Scheffer et al. 2012, Hughes
et al. 2013). Living with such complexity and change is facilitated
by collaborative and adaptive approaches to management and
governance of the biosphere with decision making subject to high
degrees of uncertainty and with continuous learning as an
important feature (e.g., Ludwig et al. 2001, Folke et al. 2005).
Resilience of people or planet in development?
In resilience thinking and social-ecological systems research
people are viewed as part of the planet, as part of the biosphere
and consequently development issues, whether for poverty
alleviation, reduced inequality, or diverse aspects of power, are
embedded in a biosphere context. But it has to be stressed that
even if a social-ecological system may seem to be on a sustainable
biosphere pathway for human well-being, actions to improve
resilience on that pathway may benefit resilience of some and
undermine resilience and increase vulnerability of others (e.g.,
Lebel et al. 2006, Leach et al. 2010). In contrast, actions aimed
at increasing resilience of individuals, communities, nations as the
core focus may reinforce unsustainable pathways, undermine
biosphere resilience and challenge sustainability (e.g., Arrow et
al. 1995, Westley et al. 2011). Determining when resilience is on
a desirable or undesirable path, and for whom, is an inherently
value-laden, subjective and political question, a question that, if
sustainability is in focus, needs to be connected to human well-
being as part of the biosphere. From this perspective, sustainable
development for humanity needs to be guided by approaches
based on epistemologies and ontologies of development that
appreciate the human-biosphere relationship.
Although on the table, issues of distribution, inequality, and
diverse aspects of power and politics in their own right were not
the core in the emergence of resilience thinking. Rather, they were
incorporated as part of analyses of complex adaptive social-
ecological systems, reflected in the abundant resilience work on
agency, actors, participation, diverse knowledge systems,
learning, coproduction, adaptive management, social networks,
collective action, institutions, stewardship, social-ecological
innovation, transformation, and multilevel and adaptive
governance of social-ecological systems. Issues of inequality and
diverse aspects of power and politics in social-ecological systems
and sustainability are explicitly addressed through collaboration
across knowledge domains and in the continuous evolution of
resilience thinking (e.g., Lebel et al. 2006, Crona and Bodin 2010,
Raudsepp-Herne et al. 2010a, Smith and Stirling 2010, Michon
2011, Robards et al. 2011, Enfors 2013, Fischer et al. 2015, Stone-
Jovicich 2015, Boonstra 2016). In this context, Brown (2016)
argues that resilience can help understand and respond to the
challenges of the contemporary age, challenges characterized by
high uncertainty, globalized and interconnected systems,
increasing disparities, and limited choices.
Resilience is increasingly having an impact on development
research, from the individual, to community, to society as a whole.
Development research with a resilience connection is becoming
abundant, theoretically and empirically (e.g., Hall and Lamont
2013, Béné et al. 2016). For example, development resilience has
been defined as “the capacity over time of a person, household
or other aggregate unit to avoid poverty in the face of various
stressors and in the wake of myriad shocks. If and only if that
capacity is and remains high over time, then the unit is resilient”
(Barrett and Constas 2014). The theory of development resilience
approaches poverty dynamics of individuals in a way that makes
the literature of economics and social science on poverty and
poverty traps more explicit when considering issues of risk,
dynamics, and appreciation of ecological feedback. This
definition of resilience at the microscale puts the individual agents
and their basic rights and aspirations for improved living
conditions in focus.
There is work on poverty, adaptability, food security, social
protection, adaptive capacity, and resilience of individuals,
households, and groups in relation to ecosystem and
environmental change in general, and climate change in particular
(e.g., Kelly and Adger 2000, Berkes and Jolly 2001, Thomas and
Twyman 2005, Andrew et al. 2007, Boyd et al. 2008, Davies et al.
2013, Marshall and Stokes 2014, Nayak et al. 2014, Cinner et al.
2015). For example, Béné et al. (2016) in their review of resilience
in food security, nutrition, and development, employ the
definition of resilience as used here (see above) in relation to short-
term humanitarian interventions, climate change projects, and
long-term development programs. They argue that resilience
results from the combination of absorptive capacity leading to
persistence, adaptive capacity leading to incremental
adjustments/changes and adaptation, and transformative
capacity leading to transformational responses.
Community resilience has surfaced as a vibrant area (e.g.,
Amundsen 2012, Berkes and Ross 2013). For example, it has been
found that communities can seize on the window of opportunity
created by climate-induced shocks to generate sustained social-
ecological improvement, implying that management should foster
local capacities for endogenous institutional change to enhance
community resilience to climate shocks (McSweeney and Coomes
2011). Norris et al. (2008) argue that community resilience
emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities, namely
economic development, social capital, information and
communication, and community competence and as a whole they
help provide community capacity to deal with change, like
disasters. Robards and Alessa (2004) note that Arctic

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communities have maintained their existence over time by their
ability to recognize gradual or rapid changes and to adapt to those,
rather than to any specific outcomes of a change. Resilience as a
dynamic concept is reflected in the definition of community
resilience as the existence, development, and engagement of
community resources by community members to thrive in an
environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability,
and surprise and adapt and occasionally transform (Margis 2010).
It is about planning for not having a plan, which requires
flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of
information that function in the face of unknowns (Norris et al.
2008). The cross-scale dimension of community and social
resilience and in relation to globalization processes is gaining
attention and striking the right balances between communities
and their scalar interactions, and dependencies on global
economic processes is key for social-ecological resilience (e.g.,
Wilson 2012, Scholes et al. 2013, Crona et al. 2015).
Brown and Westaway (2011) provide an excellent resilience review
synthesizing knowledge on agency, adaptive capacity, and
resilience across human development, well-being, and disasters
literature to provide insights to support more integrated and
human-centered approaches to understanding environmental
change. They find first, that there has been a shift away from the
notion that central concepts of resilience thinking—adaptive
capacity, resilience, and well-being—can be objectively measured
by a set of quantifiable indicators to a much more complex,
nuanced view that understands them as comprising subjective,
relational, as well as objective aspects. Second, there is a growing
recognition that dynamic systems approaches, including
ecological or social-ecological in its broadest sense, and cross-
scale perspectives are necessary. Third, in the human
development, well-being, and disasters fields, there is a move away
from deficit models to ideas about assets and capacities (Brown
and Westaway 2011).
Brown (2016) in the recent book on resilience in development
argues that a resilience-based approach to development might
radically transform responses to climate change, to the dilemmas
of managing ecosystems, and to rural and urban poverty in the
developing world. She elaborates the notion of everyday forms of
resilience as part of a new development agenda with three core
components: resistance, rootedness, and resourcefulness.
Resistance puts concerns for politics and power at the heart of
resilience, how new spaces for change can be opened up and how
positive transformation might be shaped and mobilized.
Rootedness is about locating culture and place, both as
biophysical environment and context and as identity and
attachment, whilst also working at and across multiple scales.
Resourcefulness concerns capacities, types of knowledge,
innovation, and learning and how resources can be accessed and
used in response to change.
In a classic paper, Adger (2000) compares social and ecological
resilience and defines social resilience as the ability of groups or
communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a
result of social, institutional, political, and environmental change.
Hall and Lamont (2013) present a systems-oriented definition of
social resilience that, very much like resilience thinking,
emphasizes adaptation or transformation over return to an earlier
state. They are interested, in general terms, in the understanding
of how individuals, communities, and societies secure their well-
being in the face of its challenges, how well-being is secured by
groups of people more or less bound together in an organization,
class, group, community, or country. More specifically, they see
social resilience in dynamic terms as the achievement of well-being
even when that entails significant modifications to behavior or to
the social frameworks that structure and give meaning to behavior.
Well-being in this context refers broadly to physical and
psychological health, material sustenance, and the sense of dignity
and belonging that comes with being a recognized member of the
community or society. Hence, in focus is the capacity of individuals
or groups to secure favorable outcomes (material, symbolic,
emotional) under new circumstances and when necessary by new
means. Consequently, social resilience is used to denote an outcome
in which members of a group sustain their well-being in the face
of challenges to it (Hall and Lamont 2013).
The additional argument from resilience thinking is that well-being
of individuals, communities, and societies is tightly coupled to the
capacity of the biosphere to sustain it. This is an obvious fact in a
situation when the scale, connectivity, spread, and speed of human
actions shape the dynamics of the biosphere and the earth system
as a whole (e.g., Turner et al. 1990, Steffen et al. 2007, 2015, Folke
et al. 2011).
RESILIENCE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
The scale of human actions and the speed, spread, and connectivity
of globalization create new complex dynamics across levels and
domains that play out in new ways (e.g., Young et al. 2006, Walker
et al. 2009b, Biggs et al. 2011, Homer-Dixon et al. 2015).
Interconnections of humans in a globalized society can propagate
and cascade across countries and regions (e.g., Adger et al. 2009,
Galaz et al. 2011, Liu et al. 2013, Eriksson et al. 2015, Österblom
et al. 2015), shaping landscapes, seascapes, the well-being of people
and social-ecological systems worldwide (e.g., Holling 1995,
Hughes et al. 2003, Berkes et al. 2006, Fairhead et al. 2012, Galaz
2014, Lazarus 2014, Merrie et al. 2014. Keys et al. 2016). These
interactions and feedbacks are not just global but cross-scale (e.g.,
Deutsch et al. 2007, Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011, Thyresson et al.
2011, Crona et al. 2015, Galaz et al. 2015) and their speed may
even make the global operate faster than the local. It implies that
studies and action of the local should not only focus on endogenous
relations, but also account for and prepare for living and
collaborating with influences from other levels, be it political
decisions, economic drivers, transnational companies, migration
policies, altered rainfall patterns, or climate change (e.g., Walker
et al. 2009b, Folke et al. 2011, Rockström et al. 2014a). Some of
those may be slow creeping influences, others abrupt and surprising
(e.g., Hansen et al. 2012, Hughes et al. 2013, Homer-Dixon et al.
2015). It is a truly intertwined social-ecological planet we are living
on.
The great acceleration of the human dimension on earth, in terms
of people and activities, and diverse reasons behind it from the
discovery of fossil fuels to power dynamics between nations and
regions, has placed humanity in new terrain as a major force in
shaping biosphere processes. This scale increase in relation to the
life-supporting biosphere (e.g., Boulding 1966, Odum 1989, Daily
and Ehrlich 1992, Arrow et al. 1995) has moved humanity into a
proposed new geological era, the Antropocene, the age of man
(Steffen et al. 2007, Brondizio et al. 2016). Resilience and regime

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shifts are part of the challenges humanity is facing in the
Anthropocene, from regional tipping points (e.g., Lenton et al.
2008, Österblom and Folke 2015) to possible shifts at planetary
scales (e.g., Steffen et al. 2011, Barnosky et al. 2012) and
assessments of dynamic planetary boundaries in this context
(Rockström et al. 2009, Steffen et al. 2015). It has been suggested
that to sustain the planet in a Holocene-like state (the geological
era of the last 11 thousand years of favorable condition for
development of human civilizations), transformations at local
and regional scales will be needed (e.g., Steffen et al. 2015). In
other words, to sustain resilience of favorable biosphere
conditions for humanity as a whole, there will have to be
transformations toward new ways of development, not just
incremental tweaking of business as usual on current
development pathways (e.g., Folke et al. 2010, Westley et al. 2011).
Views on good or bad pathways of transformations differ and
often depend on values and political positions on issues like
globalization, power inequalities, and distribution conflicts of
development, uneven environmental degradation included (e.g.,
Hornborg et al. 2007). A resilience approach would emphasize
flexibility and opportunity of diverse pathways and keeping
options open to be able to shift between those, in a manner that
remains within the safe operating space of the biosphere, and with
prosperity and abundance for humans in collaboration with
biosphere resilience.
Capturing resilience
Resilience as an approach for analyzing, understanding, and
managing change in social-ecological systems is different from
resilience as a property of a social-ecological system (e.g., Nelson
et al. 2007, Biggs et al. 2015). Resilience as a system property is,
as discussed earlier, the capacity of a specific social-ecological
system to continually self-organize and adapt in the face of
ongoing change in a way that sustains the system in a certain
stability domain or development path. When analyzing resilience
as a system property in relation to regime shifts it is useful to
consider resilience of what to what (Carpenter et al. 2001). Biggs
et al. (2015) see resilience as the capacity of a social-ecological
system to sustain human well-being in the face of change, by
persisting and adapting or transforming in response to change. A
central challenge in this context is the capacity of social-ecological
systems to continue providing key ecosystem services that
underpin human well-being in the face of unexpected shocks as
well as gradual, ongoing change (e.g., Bennett et al. 2009,
Carpenter et al. 2009a, Biggs et al. 2015).
How can resilience as a property be captured? There is a search
for metrics and indicators of resilience, not an easy task because
social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems, with
moving targets continuously developing and evolving. It is
important to avoid the trap of developing metrics of what is easy
to measure rather than what is important (Carpenter et al. 2009b).
Developing a set of indicators of resilience as a system property
may block the deeper understanding of system dynamics needed
to apply resilience thinking and navigate a turbulent world (e.g.,
Quinlan et al. 2015). Therefore, resilience as a system property
should not be reduced to a simple metric, but different types of
metrics and indicators need to be used and combined to capture
facets of resilience and help guide management and governance.
A snapshot of approaches is presented below.
In recent years progress has been made in understanding signals
of regime shifts and critical transitions. Resilience research has
clarified how phenomena such as flickering, critical slowing
down, increased autocorrelation, decreasing recovery rates, and
increased variance can serve as “early warnings” of loss of
resilience and regime shifts in nature, from ecosystems to the
dynamics of the planet as a whole (e.g., Dakos et al. 2008,
Scheffer et al. 2012), and how such signals relate to management,
human behavior, and the safe-operating spaces of ecosystem
regimes (e.g., Biggs et al. 2009, Crépin et al. 2012, Scheffer et al.
2015, Schill et al. 2015). The safe-operating space was proposed
in relation to zones of uncertainty with potential thresholds of
critical processes at the global level, or planetary boundaries,
where loss of resilience and regime shifts may challenge essential
favorable conditions for human life on Earth (Rockström et al.
2009).
Several studies aim at developing resilience indicators in relation
to regime shifts in diverse ecosystems, often with a focus on the
interplay of fast and slow variables and feedback management
(e.g., Carpenter et al. 2001, Nyström et al. 2008, 2012, Graham
et al. 2013, Jouffray et al. 2015) and how those are connected in
dynamic landscapes and seascapes and across scales, i.e., spatial
resilience (e.g., Nyström and Folke 2001, Bengtsson et al. 2003,
Cumming 2011, Sundstrom et al. 2014) or with broader processes
like rainfall patterns (Gordon et al. 2008, Keys et al. 2012) or
fisheries and global seabird populations (Cury et al. 2011). There
are efforts aimed at capturing resilience in economic terms and
models in relation to regime shifts (e.g., Mäler and Li 2010,
Walker et al. 2010, Polasky et al. 2011a, Crépin et al. 2012, de
Zeeuw 2014, Richter and Dakos 2015).
Others are developing metrics of change in ecosystem services
and natural capital in relation to social-ecological systems and
human well-being and with connections to resilience (e.g.,
Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010b, Guerry et al. 2015). Some focus
on measuring resilience for whom at the individual level and
often in relation to poverty (e.g., Barrett and Constas 2014) or
on understanding how communities can transform out of
poverty traps (e.g., Enfors 2013) or on how to break resilience
of one development path and transform to another and build
resilience of that path (e.g., Moore et al. 2014). Crisis turning
into windows of opportunity and aligning actors and networks
across multilayers of governance at critical moments seem to be
of significance in such social-ecological regime shifts (e.g.,
Olsson et al. 2004, Chapin et al. 2010, Schultz et al. 2015).
There are those who concentrate on adaptation and adaptive
capacity in relation to change with links to resilience thinking
(e.g., Wise et al. 2014) and there have been attempts to identify
surrogates for resilience (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2005) as well as
sources of resilience (e.g., Adger et al. 2005b, 2011, Goulden et
al. 2013). The latter concept is closely related to the theoretical
concept of “remember” for reorganization (Gunderson and
Holling 2002), which has inspired studies on social-ecological
memory as critical for resilience building as well as the role of
biocultural refugia as pockets of social-ecological memory in
times of change (Barthel et al. 2010, 2013, Barthel and Isendahl
2013). The role of memory and sources of resilience are
addressed in work on cultural landscapes and with links to sense-
of-place and deep identities as resilience features in adaptations

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and transformations (e.g., Turner et al. 2003b, Crane 2010, Tidball
et al. 2010, Plieninger and Bieling 2012, Adger et al. 2013, Tidball
and Stedman 2013, Lyon 2014, Fernández-Giménez 2015). There
is work on cultural resilience, often in relation to indigenous groups
and cultures subject to change, emphasizing elements (e.g.,
resilience pivots, ancestral contracts) of a social-ecological system
that endure despite adaptation or even transformation of other
elements and in doing so support the persistence of the system’s
distinctive identity (e.g., Forbes 2013, Rotarangi and Stephenson
2014, von Heland and Folke 2014).
Another critical feature concerns the role of functional biodiversity
and functional groups of species in ecosystem resilience and regime
shifts (e.g., Peterson et al. 1998, Walker et al. 1999, Bellwood et al.
2004, Folke et al. 2004, Hughes et al. 2007) with parallels to the
role of agency and diverse actors and actor groups in social-
ecological system dynamics and their adaptations and
transformations (e.g., Folke et al. 2003, 2005, Westley et al. 2013).
Functional diversity and social actor strategies are increasingly
linked (e.g., Diaz et al. 2011). A critical concept for resilience
management in this context is response diversity, defined as the
diversity of responses to environmental change among species
contributing to the same ecosystem function (Elmqvist et al. 2003).
Response diversity has been found to be particularly important for
renewal and reorganization in ecosystems following change (e.g.,
Hughes et al. 2007, Winfree and Kremen 2009, Jansson and
Polasky 2010, Laliberte et al. 2010). The concept is gaining interest
in research on social-ecological systems including livelihood
options across multiple levels (e.g., Leslie and McCabe 2013) and
in governance and management of urban landscapes and
ecosystem services (e.g., Andersson et al. 2007, Colding 2007).
There will always be tension between the degree of simplification
that measurement and metrics demand and the point at which these
make the system understanding fragmented and their
implementation meaningful (Quinlan et al. 2015). Resilience
assessments aim at a deep understanding of social-ecological
system dynamics, recognizing that resilience is a dynamic property
shaped by many different processes of interacting fast and slow
variables, including the larger context and cross-scale dynamics in
which the social-ecological system is embedded (e.g., Scholes et al.
2013) as well as unintentional changes of unforeseen dynamics
(e.g., Quinlan et al. 2015). Building on a theoretical foundation
and case study history, resilience assessments offer guidance
toward understanding social-ecological dynamics of a given place
and time with the objective to inform management (e.g., Walker
and Salt 2012, Mitchell et al. 2014). The practice of resilience
assessments has illustrated the value of a shared process of learning
and understanding complex social-ecological systems dynamics
(Quinlan et al. 2015). Resilience assessments have been tested and
applied in a number of settings like catchment and mountain
management in Australia and the USA, municipalities and urban
areas in Canada and Sweden, or pasture management in
Afghanistan (e.g., Walker et al. 2009a, Haider et al. 2012, Nemec
et al. 2013, Liu 2014, Lockwood et al. 2014, Sellberg et al. 2015).
An updated framework based on the Resilience Alliance’s
Workbook for practitioners (Resilience Alliance 2010), originally
developed by Lance Gunderson, Ann Kinzig, Allyson Quinlan,
and Brian Walker, combines the focus on understanding complex
adaptive social-ecological systems in the new Anthropocene
context with guiding the identification and use of indicators to
measure and monitor over time (O’Connell et al. 2015).
Resilience and stewardship of social-ecological systems: from the
local to the global
Urbanization is a major driver of the Anthropocene (e.g., Seto et
al. 2012) with well over half of the human population currently
living in urban areas. There is a tendency to become mentally
disconnected from the biosphere in urban settings (e.g., Gómez-
Baggethun and Barton 2013). There is lot of work on urban
resilience (e.g., Pickett et al. 2004, Andersson 2006, Leichenco
2011, Elmqvist et al. 2013, Marcus and Colding 2014, Pu and Qiu
2016). Green spaces and their stewards and stewardship is an
exciting area of resilience research in urban social-ecological
systems (e.g., Colding et al. 2006, Andersson et al. 2007, Colding
2007, Ernstson et al. 2008, Wilkinson et al. 2010, Wilkinson 2012,
Colding and Barthel 2013, Connolly et al. 2014) often with
emphasis on how to reconnect people in cities and urban
development to the biosphere and essential ecosystem services in
relation to resilience (e.g., Gómez-Baggethun and Barton 2013,
Jansson 2013, Andersson et al. 2014, McPhearson et al. 2015).
In the globally intertwined social-ecological system everyone is
in everyone else’s backyard, and cities both shape and are
dependent on huge areas across the planet of ecosystems support
(e.g., Folke et al. 1997, Grimm et al. 2008) for water, food, and
other ecosystem services (e.g., Bennett et al. 2014, Rist et al. 2014,
Rockström et al. 2014b, Troell et al. 2014). It will be in the self-
interest of urban dwellers in the Anthropocene to create incentives
for stewardship of their supporting ecosystems, or social-
ecological systems often far away from city borders that secure
the basis of city life.
The stewardship challenge is of central focus in resilience thinking
(e.g., Folke et al. 2003, Chapin et al. 2009; Fig. 1) from early work
on adaptive management to regime shifts and adaptive
governance of social-ecological systems and ecosystem services.
Ecosystem services are a key emergent outcome of social-
ecological interactions (e.g., Reyers et al. 2013, von Heland and
Folke 2014). But, the stewardship challenge makes clear that,
although people’s management is critical, it is not sufficient to
focus only on the human dimension if sustainability is central,
because sustainability requires governance systems and
development practices in tune with biosphere capacity (e.g., Folke
et al. 2011, Guerry et al. 2015). Therefore, ecological knowledge
and understanding of ecosystem processes and dynamics, of the
natural capital, and the social-ecological interplay of such
processes and dynamics is a prerequisite in this context (e.g. Berkes
and Folke 1998, Berkes et al. 2003). Skill sets for stewardship of
natural capital range from abilities of experimenting, learning,
and gaining ecological knowledge and experience on the ground
(e.g., Olsson et al. 2004, King 2008, Chapin et al. 2009) to
capturing and accounting for broader scales biophysical processes
like rainfall patterns or climate dynamics (e.g., Keys et al. 2012,
Rockström et al. 2014a) in the governance and management of
social-ecological systems. Supported by proper institutions and
incentives such skills help build identity, meaning, pride, and
dignity in being a steward of the ecological foundation for human
well-being in collaboration with the biosphere.

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Fig. 1. Examples of stewardship strategies for dealing with uncertainty and change and strategies to transform from unsustainable
social-ecological pathways to potentially more favorable ones (modified from Chapin et al. 2010).
Work on distribution, equality, fairness, justice, power are of
major significance in the resilience and stewardship context, but
seldom the core focus in their own right. They enter resilience
thinking as significant features of understanding and governing
social-ecological dynamics for biosphere stewardship, human
well-being, and sustainability (e.g., Lebel et al. 2006, Robards et
al. 2011, Fischer et al. 2015).
The challenge of biosphere stewardship and resilience was raised
in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and through the
engagement of resilience-oriented scholars in the development of
the assessment, especially in the case studies of the subglobal
assessment as well as the scenarios work (e.g., Capistrano et al.
2006, Reid et al. 2006). Here, the role of people as part of
ecosystem dynamics and stewardship of dynamic landscapes and
seascapes and their ecosystem services were in the forefront as well
as the challenge of bringing in diverse knowledge systems as part
of stewardship and governance across institutions at multiple
levels (Carpenter et al. 2009a).
There is a lot of work on management of ecosystem resilience for
ecosystem services (e.g., Moberg and Folke 1999, Scheffer et al.
2015) with adaptive management as a way of experimenting,
learning, and developing understanding for stewardship (e.g.,
Allen et al. 2011). The literature on adaptive comanagement of
ecosystem and complex social-ecological systems is also rich (e.g.,
Armitage et al. 2007, 2009, Berkes 2009, Cinner et al. 2012). There
is resilience work on the role of indigenous and local knowledge
systems as experienced-based knowledge for ecosystem
management of social-ecological systems including shocks (e.g.,
Berkes et al. 2000, Forbes et al. 2009, Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2013,
Rumbach and Foley 2014) and how to connect diverse knowledge
systems, the role of coproduction of knowledge, and collaborative
learning among communities and stakeholders and their
significance in stewardship of ecosystem services (e.g., Fazey et al.
2007, Raymond et al. 2010, Schultz and Lundholm 2010, Bohensky
and Maru 2011, Mathevet et al. 2011, Goldstein 2012, Boyd et al.
2013, Tengö et al. 2014, Daw et al. 2015, Reyers et al. 2015). Social-
ecological inventories have been used to set such processes in
motion (e.g., Schultz et al. 2007, Baird et al. 2014) and the concept
of ecological solidarity highlights the intertwined interplay of
social-ecological systems (Mathevet et al. 2010, 2016) .
Resilience work has studied institutions and governance structures
that allow for ecosystem-based management in some detail and

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has focused especially on the emergence of flexible governance
arrangements that have shifted and transformed human activities
toward adaptive governance of social-ecological systems (e.g.,
Folke et al. 2005, Huitema et al. 2009, Chaffin et al. 2014,
Karpouzoglou et al. 2016). This work has been particularly well
developed with regard to the stewardship of landscapes and
seascapes (e.g., Olsson et al. 2004, 2006, 2008, Gelcich et al. 2010,
Cosens and Williams 2012). Several studies illustrate the role of
institutional entrepreneurs in this context (e.g., Folke et al. 2005,
Ernstson et al. 2010, Meijerink and Huitema 2010, Rosen and
Olsson 2013, Westley et al. 2013, Merrie and Olsson 2014). In these
situations actors start interacting and connecting with each other,
often in unpredictable and unplanned ways, and from such
interactions broader scale patterns with new properties emerge,
which than feed back on the social-ecological system and influence
the actors and their interactions (Levin et al. 2013). Such a dynamic
interplay of actors, social networks, bridging organizations, and
diverse and multilevel institutions, continuously learning with
change, are found to be significant features of social-ecological
system dynamics, often emerging in relation to crisis (perceived or
real) as well as the opening of windows-of-opportunity for change
toward stewardship of ecosystem services (e.g., Olsson et al. 2004,
2008, Hahn et al. 2006, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007, Bodin and Crona
2009, Crona and Parker 2012, Rathwell and Peterson 2012,
Österblom and Folke 2013, Schultz et al. 2015). Such “adaptive
waves” of moving up scales of social-ecological systems occur both
inadvertently and deliberately in response to both rapid and
gradual changes and may lead to increased resilience on a higher
governance scale (e.g., Olsson et al. 2007, Luthe and Wyss 2015).
However, restructuring current institutions and governance
systems for resilience is no small task and the challenge in relation
to social-ecological systems and resilience is subject to a growing
literature (e.g., Dietz et al. 2003, Young 2010, 2011, Schlüter and
Herrfardt-Pähle 2011, Sjöstedt 2015). Such restructuring raises
issues of representative democracy, accountability, and legitimacy
in governance (e.g., Hahn 2011, Cosens 2013). There is also the
problem of fit between institutions, governance, and social-
ecological systems (e.g., Galaz et al. 2008, Ekstrom and Young
2009, Treml et al. 2015) and how institutions and governance
systems can handle change and stability simultaneously (e.g., Duit
et al. 2010, Voß and Bornemann 2011, Green et al. 2013) including
cascading changes of an intertwined world (e.g., Galaz et al. 2011).
Global governance challenges are raised in relation to planetary
boundaries and stewardship (e.g., Biermann et al. 2012, Galaz et
al. 2012a) and the emergence of new forms of institutions for
governance of the biosphere (e.g., Galaz et al. 2012b).
There is also work on resilience in relation to legal structures,
principles, and processes (e.g., Garmestani et al. 2013), as well as
core concepts of the rule of law (e.g., Ebbesson 2010) and to the
making of normative choices of public interest, public and private
responsibilities, and individual rights including equality before the
law and nondiscrimination (e.g., Ebbesson and Hey 2013). West
and Schultz (2015) conclude that the European Court of Human
Rights constitutes an important site of learning for governance of
social-ecological systems, because it situates knowledge and
experience of environmental change in the context of discussions
about the relative rights, duties, and responsibilities of social
actors, facilitating the mutually adaptive evolution of truth and
justice across scales. Work on new forms of social contracts,
emphasizing the dynamics, links, and complexity of social-
ecological systems is also part of the resilience discourse (O’Brien
et al. 2009). As stated by Cosens (2013) the recognition of the
complexity in the social-ecological system, coupled with a
growing realization of the complete dependence of the human
race on the ability of the ecological system to serve it, requires
reform of the administrative state to allow society to responsibly
respond to the challenge of managing human interaction with
ecosystems.
Scenario planning is a forward looking approach aimed at
articulating multiple alternative futures in a way that spans a key
set of critical uncertainties, using qualitative and quantitative
methods and data (e.g., Peterson et al. 2003b, Swart et al. 2004,
Carpenter et al. 2006) and engaging diverse stakeholder in
participatory processes for stewardship of social-ecological
systems subject to change (e.g., Enfors et al. 2008, Plieninger et
al. 2013, Carpenter et al. 2015b, Oteros-Rozas et al. 2015).
Scenario work is an important part of the Future Earth
Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), a
program with a strong focus on social-ecological systems,
resilience, and stewardship of ecosystem services in dynamic
landscapes and seascapes, operating in the context of the
challenges of the Anthropocene (Carpenter et al. 2012b, Fischer
et al 2015).
Expect the unexpected
In their paper “Environmental surprise: expecting the
unexpected?” Kates and Clark (1996) make clear that in a complex
and intertwined world surprise is to be expected. Resilience
thinking has been characterized as the science of surprise.
Surprise—when perceived reality departs qualitatively from
expectation—is strongly shaped by underlying metaphors,
models, and belief systems (Holling 1986).
Surprise is not just about shocks and extreme events but also about
slower changing and less visible dynamics (e.g., Gunderson 2001).
We are not always aware of the sands shifting beneath our feet as
events change the character of the times in diffuse ways (Hall and
Lamont 2013). Resilience thinking is about the interplay of
incremental and abrupt change, of slow and fast variables in
complex adaptive systems and how it plays out in uncertain,
surprising, and often unpredictable ways (e.g., Gunderson and
Holling 2002, Carpenter et al. 2009b). Resilience thinking is about
true uncertainty and unknown unknowns and not just about
probabilities around risk and uncertainty (Carpenter et al. 2006,
2009b, Polasky et al. 2011b).
As suggested by Holling (1986) contemporary challenges of the
globally intertwined social-ecological systems are indeed system
challenges, complex, unpredictable, nonlinear, with discontinuous
behavior in space and time and where causes, at times simple, are
always multiple. The cross-scale challenges are a reflection of
decadal to centurial accumulation of human influences on air and
oceans and transformations of landscapes causing sudden
changes in fast environmental variables and affecting the health
of people, the vitality of societies, and the essential life-support
functions of the biosphere (e.g., Clark and Munn 1986,
Gunderson et al. 1995). Indeed, the complex interplay of human
actions shaping biosphere capacity has placed humanity in a novel
situation of interactions of social-ecological systems across scales
that are expressed in new, intertwined, and often turbulent and

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surprising ways (e.g., Walker et al. 2009b, Galaz et al. 2011, Biggs
et al. 2011, Homer-Dixon et al. 2015, Steffen et al. 2015) affecting
people and places in disparate ways. The situation presents major
challenges but also opportunities for adaptation and
transformation (e.g., Adger et al. 2011, Westley et al. 2011,
Biermann et al. 2012, Galaz et al. 2012a,b, Hill and Engle 2013).
Solutions that focus on knowledge of small parts or that assume
constancy or stability of fundamental relationships tend to be
pathological producing policy and science with a sense of
certainty leading to rigid and unseeing institutions and
increasingly vulnerable social-ecological systems (Holling 1986,
Gunderson et al. 1995, Holling and Meffe 1996). It may even be
possible that recent advances and widespread availability of
information may make people overconfident about the ability to
anticipate and deal with surprise, and thereby making people
more vulnerable to it (Kates and Clark 1996). The challenge is to
anticipate change and surprise in a manner that does not lead to
lock-in and loss of future options (e.g., Costanza et al. 2000,
Berkes et al. 2003, Boyd et al. 2015).
Managing for resilience enhances the likelihood of sustaining
development in a rapidly changing world where surprise is likely
(e.g., Folke 2006, Carpenter et al. 2009b, Chapin et al. 2009). When
transformation is inevitable, resilient social-ecological systems
contain the components needed for renewal and reorganization,
reconnecting development to the biosphere for human well-being
and sustainability (e.g., Folke et al. 2002, Boyd and Folke 2012,
Biggs et al. 2015).
Resilience-building management of the Anthropocene is flexible
and open to learning. It attends to slowly changing, fundamental
variables that create memory, legacy, diversity, and the capacity
to innovate in both social and ecological components of the
system. It also conserves, builds experience, and nurtures the
diverse elements that are necessary to reorganize and adapt to
novel, unexpected, and transformative circumstances. Thus, it
increases the range of surprises with which a social-ecological
system can cope (Folke et al. 2002) and may even serve to open
windows-of-opportunity for societies to increase capacity to
govern social-ecological change over the long term (e.g., Kates
and Clark 1996, Luthe and Wyss 2015).
Often, resilience is applied to challenges relating to particular
aspects of a social-ecological system that might arise from a
particular set of sources or shocks, referred to as specified
resilience (Walker et al. 2009a). Specified resilience arises in
response to the question “resilience of what to what?” (Carpenter
et al. 2001) and for “whom” (e.g., Lebel et al. 2006). Becoming
too focused on specified resilience to increase resilience of
particular parts or dimensions of a social-ecological system to
specific disturbances may cause the system to lose resilience in
other ways. This observation is critical for, e.g., disaster
management or policies aimed at poverty alleviation (e.g., Berkes
2007, Djalante et al. 2013). For example, the Pumpa social-
ecological system of rice-paddy irrigation in Nepal developed into
a socially well-tuned institution for dealing with specific
fluctuations of climate and hydrology, but in the process the
governance structure for water management created vulnerability
to long-term changes in climate and institutional arrangements
(Cifdaloz et al. 2010).
In fact, it seem like governance and management aimed at
reducing variance in flows of ecosystem services will lead to loss
of resilience in social-ecological systems to changing conditions
(Carpenter et al. 2015a). Hence, there are trade-offs between
resilience of a social-ecological system to a small set of known
kinds of disturbance versus the vast universe of unknown novel
shocks (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2009b). Specified resilience
approaches may be narrowing options for dealing with novel
shocks and even increasing the likelihood of new kinds of
instability (Carpenter et al. 2015a). It seems like systems that
become very robust to frequent kinds of disturbance necessarily
become fragile in relation to infrequent kinds (e.g., Folke et al.
2010, Anderies 2015).
Enhancing resilience in general
General resilience is a more broad-spectrum type of resilience for
building capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or
transform in response to the unknown. It is about resilience to all
kinds of shocks, including extreme, novel, and noncomputable
ones (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2009b). Among conditions that enable
general resilience are diversity, modularity, openness, reserves,
feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust
(Carpenter et al. 2012a). General resilience is about having the
capacity to deal with ongoing diffuse gradual change, with true
uncertainty and surprise. General resilience envisions a central
role in buying insurance against surprises generated by complex
intertwined social-ecological systems of the Anthropocene. But,
as a public good it has a cost. How much general resilience is
needed, in what dimensions, and how can long-term practices be
woven into actions that also meet the immediate needs of people
and ecosystems?
Based on empirical work and case studies, Folke et al. (2003)
proposed four key features of general resilience-building for
adaptive capacity, features that interact across temporal and
spatial scales and that seem of significance for dealing with
dynamics in social-ecological systems:
. learning to live with change and uncertainty;
. nurturing diversity for reorganization and renewal;
. combining different types of knowledge for learning; and
. creating opportunity for self-organization toward social-
ecological sustainability.
The first emphasizes the significance of accepting uncertainty and
surprise, taking advantage of change and crisis, and having the
capacity of turning change into opportunity for social-ecological
development in tune with the biosphere. The second illuminates
the importance of nurturing diversity for social-ecological
resilience, recognizing that diversity is more than insurance
against uncertainty and surprise. It also provides the bundle of
components, and their history, that makes development and
innovation following disturbance and crisis possible, components
that are embedded in the social-ecological memory. The third is
about the significance of peoples’ knowledge, experience, and
understanding about ecosystem dynamics and their inclusion in
management practice and institutions. The fourth brings these
issues together in the context of self-organization, scale,
governance, and external drivers, stressing the significance of the
dynamic interplay between diversity and disturbance (Folke et al.
2003).

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Biggs et al. (2012b, 2015) have identified a set of seven generic
and policy-relevant principles for enhancing resilience of critical
ecosystem services for human well-being in the face of disturbance
and ongoing change in complex social-ecological systems. These
principles are (P1) maintain diversity and redundancy, (P2)
manage connectivity, (P3) manage slow variables and feedbacks,
(P4) foster an understanding of social-ecological systems as
complex adaptive systems, (P5) encourage learning and
experimentation, (P6) broaden participation, and (P7) promote
polycentric governance systems. Quinlan et al. (2015) divided the
principles along two axes by whether they focus primarily on the
resilience of a social-ecological system or its governance, and by
whether they focus on resilience based on system structure or its
dynamics, strategies that are complementary and can be
combined (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Principles for enhancing resilience in relation to the
structure and dynamics of social-ecological systems and their
analysis and management and governance (modified from
Quinlan et al. 2015).
Briefly summarized, the principles stress that (P1) high levels of
diversity and redundancy, but not too high, tend to make social-
ecological systems more resilient to change and provide options
and flexibility for development; that (P2) connectivity needs to
be managed for sources of resilience, for trust in networks, for
new information, etc., but that there is a tension between too much
connectivity versus modularity in complex social-ecological
systems operating across levels and scales; that (P3) where known,
changes in slow variables and feedbacks should be monitored with
governance systems that can respond in a timely manner, and
those supporting biosphere stewardship for ecosystem services
and human well-being should be strengthened; that (P4) fostering
complex adaptive-system thinking entails uncertainty, that
tolerant cultures investigating potential nonlinearities and
thresholds, allowing for diverse types of knowledge, and matching
institutions and governance to complex adaptive system
processes; that (P5) encouraging learning through experimentation
and monitoring is essential for enabling adaptive responses and
it requires social capital; that (P6) participation, and how it takes
place, is facilitated, and the skills involved, is key for learning,
building social capital and collective action; and finally, that (P7)
polycentricity of governance enables the other resilience
enhancing principles. Their implementation involves clarification
of goals and developing and monitoring relevant metrics for each
principle, taking an integrative approach that builds on multiple
knowledge systems, shifting away from exclusively managing for
efficiency toward planning for uncertainty and surprise, creating
spaces for spontaneous exploration, and building trust and social
capital (Biggs et al. 2015).
Such principles, whether for resilience building, collective action
dilemmas (e.g., Ostrom 1990), or adaptive governance (e.g., Folke
et al. 2005), should not be approached as end goals but rather as
processes or mechanisms for generating conditions that allow for
resolving collective-action challenges associated with multiple
trade-offs in complex social-ecological systems. Such principles
challenge the presumption that scholars can make simple,
predictive models of social-ecological systems and deduce universal
solutions, panaceas, to implement a certain principle (e.g., Holling
et al. 1998, Ostrom 2007, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2012, Biggs et al. 2015,
Clarvis et al. 2015). Rather, they support reflection, learning, and
adaptation in search of deep understanding of complex,
multivariable, nonlinear, cross-scale, and changing social-
ecological systems and how to relate this understanding for
biosphere stewardship.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Resilience thinking is an integrative approach for dealing with the
sustainability challenge. It is about cultivating the capacity to
sustain development in the face of change, incremental and abrupt,
expected and surprising, in relation to diverse pathways and
thresholds and tipping points between them. Resilience thinking
can be viewed as a subset of sustainability science and has a strong
focus on complex adaptive and truly intertwined social-ecological
systems of people, communities, economies, societies, cultures
interacting across spatial and temporal scales with ecosystems as
part of the biosphere. The scale, speed, and connectivity of human
actions in a globalized and intertwined world create new complex
dynamics that play out in new, uncertain, and surprising ways and
differently for different people and places. Resilience of a social-
ecological system refers to the capacity to develop and sustain
human well-being in diverse contexts in the face of such change,
both incremental and abrupt, but also through adapting or
transforming in response to change.
Social-ecological systems are embedded in the biosphere. The
biosphere connection is a central observation of resilience thinking,
an observation that has to be explicit in work on resilience and
social-ecological systems if sustainability is to be taken seriously.
Confronted with planetary boundaries, it will become central for
human well-being in the urbanized 21st century to create incentives
for transformation of human actions toward stewardship of
complex adaptive social-ecological systems in ways that are in tune
with the resilience of the biosphere. Well-being and development
ultimately rests on biosphere capacity.
Responses to this article can be read online at:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/responses.
php/9088
Acknowledgments:
Thanks in particular to Frances Westley, Elin Enfors, Magnus
Nyström, Maja Schlüter, Oonsie Biggs, Lance Gunderson, and several

Ecology and Society 21(4): 44
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other colleagues for providing constructive and inspiring comments
on the manuscript that resulted in the Oxford Research
Encyclopedia publication of which this article is a reprint. This
review serves as a contribution to the GRAID-programme funded
by Sida. It has also partly been supported by grants from the Erling-
Persson Family Foundation and the Marianne and Marcus
Wallenberg Foundation.
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