Defining tipping points for social-ecological systems scholarship—an interdisciplinary literature review
By M. Milkoreit, J. Hodbod, J. Baggio, K. Benessaiah, R. Calderón-Contreras, Jonathan F. Donges, J. Mathias, J. Rocha, Michael Schoon, S. Werners. 2018
251 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The term tipping point has experienced explosive popularity across multiple disciplines over the last decade. Research on social-ecological systems (SES) has contributed to the growth and diversity of the term’s use. The diverse uses of the term obscure potential differences between tipping behavior in natural and social systems, and issues of causality across natural and social system components in SES. This paper aims to create the foundation for a discussion within the SES research community about the appropriate use of the term tipping point, especially the relatively novel term ‘social tipping point.’ We review existing literature on tipping points and similar concepts (e.g. regime shifts, critical transitions) across all spheres of science published between 1960 and 2016 with a special focus on a recent and still small body of work on social tipping points. We combine quantitative and qualitative analyses in a bibliometric approach, rooted in an expert elicitation process. We find that the term tipping point became popular after the year 2000—long after the terms regime shift and critical transition—across all spheres of science. We identify 23 distinct features of tipping point definitions and their prevalence across disciplines, but find no clear taxonomy of discipline-specific definitions. Building on the most frequently used features, we propose definitions for tipping points in general and social tipping points in SES in particular.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/449eff0c05dd247b89afe38fd66a42804f089a9f
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In Environmental Engineering
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050 (2020, background): “Potential STEs share one defining characteristic: A small change or intervention in the subsystem can lead to large changes at the macroscopic level (23) and drive the World–Earth system into a new basin of attraction, making the transition difficult to reverse (20).”