Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability

By Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter, B. Walker, Marten Scheffer, T. Chapin, J. Rockström. 2010

3,961 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social-ecological systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. Adaptability is part of resilience. It represents the capacity to adjust responses to changing external drivers and internal processes and thereby allow for development along the current trajectory (stability domain). Transformability is the capacity to cross thresholds into new development trajectories. Transformational change at smaller scales enables resilience at larger scales. The capacity to transform at smaller scales draws on resilience from multiple scales, making use of crises as windows of opportunity for novelty and innovation, and recombining sources of experience and knowledge to navigate social-ecological transitions. Society must seriously consider ways to foster resilience of smaller more manageable SESs that contribute to Earth System resilience and to explore options for deliberate transformation of SESs that threaten Earth System resilience.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/178f1bbc4fffe48b1f4be9b67d281c727a16e531

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Citations in the corpus

Towards Sustainable Cities: Extending Resilience with Insights from Vulnerability and Transition Theory (2013, background): “Third, there is a useful distinction to be made between specific and general resilience [8,9].”
Searching for resilience: the impact of employee-level and entrepreneur-level resilience on firm performance in small family firms (2020, positive): “Others suggest that resilience can be acquired over time (Masten 2001; Sutcliffe and Vogus 2003; Folke et al. 2010).”
Community resilience to long-term tourism decline and rejuvenation: a literature review and conceptual model (2016, background): “To enhance the ability of resilience to be applied to whole community systems, studies are exploring adaptive management and adaptive governance strategies to increase the theory’s practical application with complex community systems (Cosens, 2013; Folke et al., 2005).”
Ecosystem services assessment: A review under an ecological-economic and systems perspective (2014, background): “Georgescu-Roegen (1971) developed a fund-flow approach to production theory based on the distinction between funds (the agents of a production process) and flows (the elements used or acted upon by the agents).”
Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective (2014, background): “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).”
Navigating the adaptive cycle: an approach to managing the resilience of social systems (2015, background): “…were made building on these concepts within the ecological field, and expanding them to social-ecological systems (e.g., Gunderson 2000, Walker et al. 2002, 2004, Folke et al. 2005, 2010, Wilson et al. 2013), and then to social systems (e.g., Amundsen 2012, Radywyl and Biggs 2013, Ratter 2013).”
Entrepreneurship as the Unsung Hero during the Current COVID-19 Economic Crisis: Australian Perspectives (2020, background): “From a sustainability standpoint, research of these resilient responses may examine how entrepreneurs and their particular contexts restore their socioeconomic communities by adhering to or altering their behaviour, business models, and influence on sustainability trajectories [14].”