Copyright © 2014 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance.
Olsson, P., V. Galaz, and W. J. Boonstra. 2014. Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective. Ecology and Society 19(4): 1.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06799-190401
Research
Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective
Per Olsson
1
, Victor Galaz
1
and Wiebren J. Boonstra
1
ABSTRACT. Scholars and policy makers are becoming increasingly interested in the processes that lead to transformations toward
sustainability. We explored how resilience thinking, and a stronger focus on social-ecological systems, can contribute to existing studies
of sustainability transformations. First, we responded to two major points of critique: the claim that resilience theory is not useful for
addressing sustainability transformations, and that the role of “power” in transformation processes has been underplayed by resilience
scholars. Second, we highlighted promising work that combines insights from different theoretical strands, a strategy that strengthens
our understanding of sustainability transformations. We elaborated three research areas on which such combined perspectives could
focus: innovation and social-ecological-technological systems interactions, patterns of transformation, and agency and transformation.
Key Words: agency; innovation; resilience; social-ecological systems; sustainability transformation
INTRODUCTION
Scientists concerned about the future of the planet have for more
than a decade pointed to the urgent need for sustainability
transformations (Clark 2001, Kates et al. 2001, Raskin et al. 2002,
Schellnhuber et al. 2011, Weinstein et al. 2013). They recognize
that such shifts require radical, systemic shifts in values and
beliefs, patterns of social behavior, and multilevel governance and
management regimes. For example, the first Nobel laureate event
and the Potsdam Memorandum pondered the Great
Transformation and pleaded for fundamental changes in our
economies and societies to achieve sustainability. In the
proceedings from the meeting, Gell-Mann (2010) identified a set
of interlinked transitions that must occur if the world is to shift
from present trends to greater sustainability: (1) a demographic
transition, (2) a technological transition, (3) an economic
transition, (4) a social transition, (5) an institutional transition,
(6) an informational transition, and (7) an ideological transition.
Despite these pleas for major change, there is still a need to
increase the understanding of the mechanisms and patterns, as
well as conditions, underlying transformations. This would
greatly increase the chances for successfully navigating
transformations and embarking on sustainable trajectories.
A number of promising conceptual frameworks have emerged for
studying sustainability transformations, including transition
management and resilience theory. Both of these describe
sustainability transformations as multilevel, multiphase, and
cross-scale processes but have different points of departure and
theoretical focuses. The main difference is that resilience scholars
have focused mainly on the capacity of social-ecological systems
to deal with disruptive change, whereas transition management
scholars have focused on achieving nonlinear change in socio-
technological systems. However, over the past decade, these fields
have moved closer together; the resilience field is now looking at
issues traditionally addressed by transition management scholars,
such as technological change, transformation, governance, and
social aspects. Likewise, the field of transition management
reflects an interest in themes familiar to resilience scholars: social-
ecological systems, biodiversity, and ecosystem services.
Resilience theory has a strong focus on social-ecological system
dynamics and interactions. It builds on the notion that humans
are ultimately dependent on healthy ecosystems for their well-
being and that paying attention to ecosystems’ capacity to
generate essential services is of crucial importance (Berkes and
Folke 1998). Folke et al. (2011) argue that any attempts to create
sustainability transformations should involve strategies for
“reconnecting to the biosphere,” which entails a view of humans
and nature as an integral whole within which a healthy planet is
the premise for economic and social development. Resilience
scholars also pay attention to the mismatches between
environmental governance systems and ecosystem dynamics,
which threaten to erode social-ecological resilience and push life-
supporting ecosystems over critical thresholds into more
degraded, less productive regimes. For our purpose, we define
sustainability transformations as shifts that fundamentally alter
human and environmental interactions and feedbacks (Walker et
al. 2004).
Since the mid-1990s, a growing group of resilience scholars have
been studying transformations toward improved ecosystem
stewardship and global sustainability (e.g., Gunderson et al. 1995,
Gunderson and Holling 2002, Olsson et al. 2004b, 2006, Walker
et al. 2004, Chapin et al. 2010, Folke et al. 2010, Westley et al.
2011). Their work explores the interrelations between agency,
networks, institutions, and innovation. A main focus has been on
the emergence of new governance and management systems that
can restore, sustain, and develop the capacity of ecosystems to
generate essential services. Most of these studies have been carried
out at local to national levels. However, in light of the recent work
in Earth system science and on planetary boundaries (Rockström
et al. 2009, Walker et al. 2009, Steffen et al. 2011), Westley et al.
(2011) also discuss the need for radical transformations in human-
environmental interactions and feedbacks to reverse current
trends of crossing critical thresholds and tipping points in the
Earth system.
Despite extensive work on transformations, resilience theory has
been criticized for lacking the analytical power to study such
shifts, especially regarding social aspects (see, e.g., Jerneck and
Olsson 2008, Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete 2011). Some of the
criticism is relevant for improving theory development, but some
of it builds on a misunderstanding of the theory. We aim to
respond to issues raised in the debate and to help clarify some
1
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden
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misinterpretations. We start by discussing and responding to the
specific critique raised against resilience-based theories on
transformation. Finally, we show how the fields of transition
management and resilience can be integrated and how this
combination could strengthen our analytical capacities for
understanding sustainability transformations.
RESPONSE TO COMMON CRITICISM
We summarize the main points of critique raised against resilience
thinking, mainly drawn from Smith and Sterling (2010), Voß and
Bornemann (2011), Jerneck and Olsson (2008), and Pelling and
Manuel-Navarrete (2011), but also from other relevant literature.
There are two major points of critique: the first one questions
whether resilience theory is useful for addressing sustainability
transformations, and the second one concerns power issues
related to these transformations. We aim to clarify some
misunderstandings, respond to the critique, and identify central
questions for future research.
Addressing sustainability transformations
Some critics argue that resilience theory is biased toward
persistence and is less suited for the analysis of transformations
(see, e.g., Jerneck and Olsson 2008, Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete
2011). Smith and Sterling (2010) join this critique when they raise
the question of whether structures or functions of social-
ecological systems are, or should be, resilient. They point out that
when social/political domains are included in the analysis,
maintaining functions does not necessarily correspond to
maintaining structures. For example, resilient socio-political
structures can have a negative effect on ecosystem functions,
which in turn can reduce the resilience of ecosystems and their
ability to produce services (see also Jerneck and Olsson [2008] for
a similar critique). Holling et al. (2002) coined the concept of the
rigidity trap for this type of maladaptation. It occurs when a
system’s resilience is high, i.e., when it has great ability to resist
external disturbance and persist, “beyond the point where it is
adaptive and creative” (Holling et al. 2002:96). In rigidity traps,
a high degree of connectivity and the suppression of innovation
prolong an increasingly rigid state, which can result in an
undesired regime shift in the system.
The early form of resilience theory could be criticized for being
vague on the relationship between the resilience of social and
political systems and the resilience of the social-ecological system
of which these subsystems are part. We agree that the resilience
literature often treats resilience as something good. More recently,
however, resilience scholars have been much more explicit about
the type of resilience and the systems, or domains, to which it
applies. Marschke and Berkes (2006) address the notion of bad
resilience using the concept of traps, which means that self-
reinforcing social and ecological feedback can create lock-ins that
make moving to alternate regimes and into new trajectories
extremely difficult. The tendency to lock into such patterns comes
at the cost of the capacity to respond to new problems and
opportunities. For example, archaeological studies show that
people of the Hohokam region, in the Southwest of the United
States, developed a culture and a way of life that offered few
alternatives, which led to a societal collapse (Hegmon et al. 2008).
Although conditions worsened, households failed to relocate
despite generations of poor health conditions, until the social and
physical infrastructure ultimately fell apart.
Resilience scholars are working to understand social-ecological
traps (Steneck et al. 2011, Boonstra and de Boer 2014), both how
they are created and how to escape them. For example, Enfors
(2013) maps the drivers and feedback loops that keep small-scale
agricultural social-ecological systems in dryland sub-Saharan
Africa in a poverty trap. This mapping helps to clarify when,
where, and how small-scale farm innovations can break
reinforcing feedback loops that keep the social-ecological system
on an undesirable trajectory, to enable communities to escape
poverty traps, shift livelihoods, and secure long-term provisioning
of ecosystem services (Enfors 2013). In a similar way, Sendzimir
et al. (2008) map the structure of two competing sets of feedback
loops in a water management regime in the Tiscza River, Hungary,
where the dominating loop keeps the system in an undesired
regime and on an unsustainable trajectory.
These studies focus on the interactions between the social and
ecological subsystems, how certain social structures and functions
affect ecosystem structures and functions, and how this either
enhances or reduces the resilience of the interconnected social-
ecological system. These studies clearly illustrate the need to
specify the system or subsystems of interest as a way to address
incorrect assumptions that managing for resilience aims to
maintain or enhance resilience for its own sake (Leach et al. 2007,
Voß and Bornemann 2011).
The same misunderstanding, i.e., believing that resilience scholars
always assume that resilience is something good, leads Smith and
Sterling (2010) to argue that there is a need to restrict the term
resilience to the ability to maintain system structure and function
in the face of shocks, whereas the term robustness can refer to the
ability to maintain system structure and function for
transformation in the face of long-term stresses. In conclusion,
Smith and Sterling, as well as others (Pelling and Manuel-
Navarrete 2011), rightfully argue that robustness and resilience
might be two distinct and different qualities. However, we argue
that resilience thinking and research address them both, and that
these authors have not considered the conceptual refinements and
redefinitions that have been introduced to clarify precisely the
confusion that they highlight (see Anderies et al. [2013] for an
overview of the work in this area). Two of these concepts, i.e.,
adaptability and transformability, stand out because they make
a distinction between different aspects of resilience (Walker et al.
2004, Folke et al. 2010). Transformability refers to the social-
ecological capacities that enable shifts from one regime to another,
and adaptability refers to the capacities to deal with change and
stay within a regime.
Using this distinction leads us to agree with the critics who argue
that the value of the concept of adaptive management is limited
for understanding and analyzing sustainability transformations.
Adaptive management (Holling 1978), together with its sister
concept adaptive comanagement (Olsson et al. 2004a, Armitage
et al. 2007), is linked to adaptability and is adequate for analyzing
how to maintain a certain regime and stay on the same trajectory
in the face of uncertainty and change. These concepts help explain
adaptability but are insufficient for understanding transformability,
which calls for different analytical approaches. To give an
example, the adaptive comanagement framework is useful for
analyzing the social-ecological capacities for managing the
Kristianstads Vattenrike Biosphere Area in the face of
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uncertainty and change, remaining on the same trajectory (Olsson
et al. 2007), but is inadequate for understanding the social-
ecological capacities for establishing the biosphere area and the
sequence of events that led to the new governance mode,
overcoming path dependence, and transforming into a different
trajectory with changed human-environmental interactions and
feedbacks. A pioneering study in this regard is by Marshall et al.
(2012) who investigated the difference between adaptive and
transformative capacity among peanut farmers in Queensland,
Australia. They show how features such as place attachment and
occupational identity are positive for adaptability but negative for
transformability, particularly involving relocation or loss of
place.
In summary, we think that the critique that resilience is not
adequate for addressing transformations builds on a
misconception of the theory. Resilience scholars do make a
distinction between adaptation and transformation, and the
mechanisms that reinforce a certain trajectory as well as support
shifts from one trajectory to another (Walker et al. 2004, Folke
et al. 2010). This distinction in the analysis of sustainability
transformations is also starting to be applied in other academic
fields, such as human geography (O’Brien 2012).
The cross-scale interactions are crucial in this regard, especially
for understanding the interplay between these concepts across
scale. Folke et al. (2010) explain this in the following way:
Multi-scale 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.
This points to the fact that, as in any complex adaptive system,
adaptation at one scale might require transformations at other
scales, and building resilience at a certain scale can reduce
resilience at other scales. These dynamics are a central part of the
panarchy theory (Gunderson and Holling 2002) and have sparked
a number of empirical studies of social-ecological systems at a
wide range of scales and dimensions, from rangelands (Marshall
and Stafford Smith 2010), shallow lakes (Peterson et al. 2003),
and river systems (Schlüter and Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2011) to coral
reefs (Olsson et al. 2008), and from fisher communities (Cinner
et al. 2012) to global markets (Österblom and Sumaila 2011); they
have also been used to analyze the interaction between these
different scales and dimensions (Cash et al. 2006, Folke et al. 2011,
Kok and Veldkamp 2011, van Apeldoorn et al. 2011, Galaz et al.
2012b). For example, Reij and Smaling (2008) investigate how the
diffusion of small-scale farming innovations affects large-scale
impacts on regreening Africa’s drylands and the Sahel in
particular. Hence, we recognize that transformations at one scale
do not take place in a vacuum but in a cross-scale context where,
for example, novelty and innovation are drawn from other scales
or other systems at specific times.
Resilience scholars have also explored the role of agency in
navigating social-ecological system transformations and in
linking processes across scales (Olsson et al. 2004b, 2006, Chapin
et al. 2010, Brown and Westaway 2011, Westley et al. 2011, 2013).
The literature tends to define such agency as involving individuals,
organizations, and/or networks, using concepts such as
“institutional entrepreneurship,” “transformational leadership,”
and “shadow networks.” Three main phases of transformations
in social-ecological systems have been identified: (1) preparing for
transformation, (2) navigating the transition, and (3) building the
resilience of the new direction (Olsson et al. 2004b). The first and
second phases tend to be linked by a window of opportunity. In
the preparation phase, agents of change and their networks may
work simultaneously at different scales of the social-ecological
system. By intervening at broader institutional levels, they can
open up new trajectories of development. In the navigation phase,
cross-scale brokers can provide bridging functions that connect
different actors operating at different scales and launch new
initiatives and scale up innovations (Rosen and Olsson 2013). In
the building resilience phase, bridging organizations can create
incentives and foster values for stewardship in the new context.
These studies build on the notion that complex adaptive systems
are characterized by uncertainty and surprise. This means that
the effects of human actions can never be fully anticipated or
predicted (Portes 2000) and will have unexpected and unintended
consequences. For this reason, many resilience scholars focusing
on transformations use words such as emerging and navigating
over managing, steering, or controlling transitions. The former
concepts relate closely to alternative options described in the
literature, such as piecemeal engineering (Popper 1960 [1957],
1962 [1945]), pronesis (Flyvbjerg 2001), metis (Scott 1998), or
learning by doing (Berkes et al. 2003). Some of these might be
well-planned management practices; others are better described
as muddling through (Lindblom 1959, 1979) or improvisation
(Tilly 1999).
Addressing power issues
One of the most frequently raised objections is the neglect of the
working of power in resilience studies. In its less constructive
form, resilience theory is criticized for stabilizing and reinforcing
“an incumbent (capitalist) political economy” (Voß and
Bornemann 2011:2-3, see in particular Nadasdy 2007, Hornborg
2009). A more useful critique raises concerns that by not
accounting for power dynamics, managing for resilience runs the
risk of reproducing inequality and domination. It is therefore
suggested that resilience theory needs to address the wider
political contexts in which social-ecological change is embedded.
Voß and Bornemann (2011:15) find resilience thinking
“depoliticized” and showing a “disregard for nasty politics.” In a
similar way, Smith and Sterling (2010:8-10) outline “critical
challenges” for resilience theory, which all have to do with
questions of “power.”
Studies of power are commonly used to assign responsibility or
blame to individuals or groups. They refer to a “moral context”
(Morriss 2002:38) and often conceptualize power as power over:
“when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests” (Lukes
1974:37). Young (2006:118) labeled this approach “the liability
model,” in which there must be “clear rules of evidence, not only
for demonstrating the causal connection between a given agent
and a given harm, but also for evaluating the intentions, motives,
and consequences of the actions.”
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In some cases, the impacts of how the abuse of power can contribute
to loss of resilience can be easily identified, e.g., subsidies that
support overfishing, corrupt governments that contribute to
deforestation, and so forth; in other cases, complex interactions in
social-ecological systems make this a highly difficult task. Power
often refers to structural injustice, which is typically “a result of
human action, but not of human design” (Ferguson 1995
[1767]:122). For these types of situations, several scholars have
argued that it is more helpful to think in terms of “power to”
Morriss (2002:34) and “social connections” (Young 2006). Power
to refers to “the ability to effect outcomes” (Morriss 2002:36), which
can be severely impaired because of forms of structural injustice
(Young 2006).
Although the definitions and approaches for studying power differ
considerably in the literature, we agree that power issues have been
understudied by resilience scholars and need to be addressed in the
future (Brown 2014). This, however, requires a clear definition of
the type of power relations being addressed (e.g., “power to” or
“power over”) and their relationship to the dynamics of social-
ecological change.
Nevertheless, the critique does not specify how power and resilience
can be addressed in relation to the concepts of adaptability or
transformability. By definition, adaptability helps to reproduce
social-ecological systems, whereas transformability helps to
transform them. This leads to confusion about how resilience
scholars actually can address power and the research gaps that need
to be filled. For example, resilience scholars have addressed power
as part of adaptability to a greater extent than as part of
transformability. The former includes studies of power as part of
“good governance” of social-ecological systems (Lebel et al. 2006).
Concepts such as comanagement, adaptive comanagement, or
adaptive governance explore closely related issues such as power
sharing, decentralization and devolution of management rights,
power asymmetries, and injustices that arise from structural
inequalities of power (see, e.g., Adger et al. 2005, Galaz 2005,
Cowling et al. 2008, Ernstson et al. 2008, Crona and Bodin 2010,
Moore and Tjornbo 2012). This literature addresses both issues of
“power over” and “power to” and emphasizes that the
redistribution and sharing of power is one of the key conditions
for more flexible, collaborative forms of management and
governance that contribute to long-term resilience of social-
ecological systems.
The challenge for resilience scholars is to address power as part of
transformability. It is true that few studies of transformation in
social-ecological systems have power as a central focus of their
analysis. Instead, it has been treated as one of several equally
important variables that constitute a regime (Olsson et al. 2010).
Gelcich et al. (2010) shows the emergence and the empowerment
of a shadow network that could leverage locally coproduced
knowledge into national negotiations regarding new fishery policy
after the political shift. They describe how a new governance
approach for marine resources emerged in Chile at a time of marine
resource crisis and political turbulence. The resource crisis in the
1980s triggered a few collaboration initiatives between fishers and
scientists who, for different reasons, started to experiment with new
approaches and solved their problems together. Political turbulence
in the late 1980s provided a window of opportunity for fishermen
to organize, transfer the knowledge from these experiments, and
influence the new national fishery legislation in the 1990s.
Similarly, Österblom and Folke (2013) show the connections
between agency and institutional change in the shift from open
access and illegal fishing to an adaptive governance system in the
Southern Ocean. These processes typically include overcoming
path dependence and self-reinforcing feedbacks and moving
across thresholds and tipping points to create the conditions for
more flexible, collaborative forms of governance and
management of natural resources and ecosystem services.
Overcoming reinforcing feedback requires reconfiguring power
relationships (Motion 2005) that contribute to the status quo and
bad resilience combined with strategies and transformational
agency. Reconfiguring power also requires paying attention to
scale (Sneddon 2003, Cash et al. 2006) and, more specifically, to
how biophysical and social scales are linked (Veervoort et al.
2012). Peterson (2000), for example, uses a resilience approach to
map political power across scales, which can help to identify
opportunities for change. Another helpful starting point toward
the study of power relations in transformation processes in social-
ecological systems involves the questions raised by O’Brien
(2012): Who decides to initiate transformations? Can
transformations be carried out in a deliberative, participatory
manner that is both ethical and sustainable? How can power,
politics, and interests present barriers, or pathways, to
transformation?
INTEGRATING RESEARCH FIELDS
There are several research fields that address sustainability
transformations and that can help deal with the issues and
questions raised in the previous sections. These include social
innovation, social movement, social-ecological systems’
resilience, and socio-technological transitions. We focus on the
two latter ones and discuss how these can be integrated and how
this combination could strengthen our analytical capacities for
studying sustainability transformations. We start by identifying
some of the most apparent similarities and differences.
From the start, theories of socio-technological transitions have
acknowledged the need to account for ecological change in their
models and analyses (Grin et al. 2010). However, they treat
ecological aspects as background variables, at the landscape scale,
driving sustainability transformations, or as part of a vision of
future desirable systems. However, ecological aspects are not part
of the system assessment. For instance, ecosystem shocks are not
acknowledged as disruptive drivers, nor are visions positioned
against a broader ecosystem view. Further, these theories do not
address the possible impact of desirable future systems on
biodiversity and ecosystem services. This is important because
many socio-technological systems such as housing, water
management, energy, and food production are intrinsically
connected to and affected by ecosystem dynamics.
In contrast, the primary focus for resilience thinking (sensu
Holling) is on complex social-ecological systems. It emphasizes
that a focus on connectedness between nature and human society
is particularly important for understanding sustainability
transformations that are needed for humanity to stay within
planetary safe operating space (Folke et al. 2011, Westley et al.
2011). The argument is that societies may undergo major social
and technological transformations without improving their
capacity to learn from, respond to, and manage environmental
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feedback from dynamic ecosystems (Olsson and Galaz 2012).
However, one of the shortcomings of resilience research is in the
lack of focus on the role of technology in sustainability
transformations (Galaz 2012, 2014).
An understanding of interconnected social, technological, and
ecological systems is crucial to prevent undesirable and
unintended outcomes of initiatives to move toward sustainability.
For example, there is currently an ongoing adoption of biofuels
as a substitute for oil globally, and although a systemic shift to
biofuels might slow down climate change, it also leads to
destructive land-use change and biodiversity loss when scaled up
on a global level (Grau and Aide 2008). This, in turn, can induce
further ecological degradation, regime shifts, and structurally
persistent social-ecological states that are difficult to get out of.
It has also led to land being used to cultivate fuels instead of food
and governments buying up land in countries, mostly in the
Global South, to secure their own energy supply, which in turn
has led to increased inequalities and conflicts (Borras and Franco
2010). This example illustrates how well-intended attempts to
advance sustainability transformations can have adverse social
and ecological consequences when implemented on a large scale
unless the social, technological, and ecological aspects of systems,
and their interactions, are addressed simultaneously. An
integration of the social-ecological and socio-technological
systems’ perspectives could help in addressing human-
environmental interactions more broadly. Hence, further analysis
would therefore benefit from a closer collaboration and cross-
pollination between the fields of resilience and transition
management.
Transition management scholars have developed an elaborate and
detailed model for understanding cross-scale interactions in
socio-technological systems, which entails niches at a microscale,
regimes at a mesoscale, and landscapes at a macroscale (see, e.g.,
Rotmans et al. 2001, Geels and Schot 2007, Loorbach and
Rotmans 2010). They define regimes as dominant rule sets, social
networks and organizations, and prevailing infrastructures.
Landscapes are defined as the geographic position of the land,
climate, available resources, political constellations, economic
cycles, and broad societal trends. Niches are defined as small,
protected spaces in which new practices can develop, protected
from harsh selection criteria and resistance from prevailing
regimes. Their research focuses on the dynamics within each scale
as well as cross-scale interactions, for example, the mechanisms
by which niches can cause change at the regime and landscape
scales.
Although less sophisticated in addressing the social aspects of
these cross-scale dynamics, the panarchy theory has a similar
focus. In the context of the niche causing change at the regime
and landscape levels discussed previously, panarchy theory puts
a stronger emphasis on the thresholds and tipping points involved
in such shifts. It also has a specific focus on how the social-
ecological interactions and feedbacks change in these processes.
Another important difference is that this theory deals more
specifically with the role of crisis or disturbances in triggering and
driving transformations.
The current debate among resilience scholars centers on what
constitutes a regime shift and whether all regime shifts are
transformations (Walker and Salt 2012). The question is how to
distinguish between a regime shift within the same system, i.e., a
change in the stability domain, and a change to a different system
with different feedbacks and a different set of defining state
variables. Although there is no clear answer to this question, a
promising initiative that will help explore this is the Regime Shift
Database (http://www.regimeshifts.org). This initiative compiles
examples of various types of regime shifts that have been
documented in ecosystems and social-ecological systems. The
database focuses particularly on regime shifts that have major
impacts on ecosystem services, and therefore on human well-
being. Many of the initial entries into the database have focused
on unintended shifts to more degraded ecological and social-
ecological systems. The next step for this initiative is to start
entering cases of actively navigated social-ecological
transformations (as defined by Olsson et al. 2006, Chapin et al.
2010).
Synthesizing, analyzing, and comparing social-ecological
transformations will be an opportunity to connect resilience
scholars to other fields that focus on transformations, including
transition management and human geography. For example,
resilience research would benefit greatly from the insights on the
role of power in innovation and transition management (Avelino
2009, Avelino and Rotmans 2009, 2011) to analyze both the
structural power of regimes to sustain their position as well as
innovative power to transform regimes.
Panarchy theory emphasizes that building transformative
capacity requires systemic experimentation and innovation and
ways to coordinate and combine these across scales at critical
times. This is also in line with the findings of scholars in transition
management (e.g., Grin et al. 2010, Loorbach 2010) who argue
that the ability to create space for and coordinate collaborative
experiments that contribute to system innovation is of crucial
importance in releasing lock-ins and enabling shifts to new
trajectories. They highlight, for example, the role of transition
arenas and their importance in experimenting with new
approaches for governing water resources in the Netherlands (van
der Brugge and van Raak 2007). These arenas are particularly
useful for exploring value conflicts, contradicting worldviews, and
solving tensions among stakeholders. From a resilience
perspective, such “systemic experiments” should focus on
broadening the diversity of options, ideas, institutions,
organizational settings, and practices (see, e.g., Bormann and
Kiester 2004, Rudd 2004) in relation to social-ecological systems
and ecosystem services (Cummings et al. 2013). A combination
of resilience and transition management perspectives could help
design studies of interactive innovation spaces or change labs
(Westley et al. 2011) and the role they play for experimenting with
new configurations of linked social and ecological systems and
enabling the emergence of different sets of feedbacks.
Integrating these research fields will be, of course, far from easy,
especially because the different fields embed different hidden
values, ask different questions, employ different methods, and
gather and analyze different data (cf. Lélé and Norgaard 2005,
Miller et al. 2008, Strang 2009). In addition, there is a difficult
balance between theoretical simplicity and elegance, and
frameworks with the ambition to provide understandings of
complex processes. This however, should not be seen as an
impossible obstacle as we aim to move beyond disciplinary