Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective
By P. Olsson, Victor Galaz, W. J. Boonstra. 2014
584 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5dfc80042e1315bc825d48868168e710a88ad942
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Management Science and Operations Research
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Synthesis, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Social-Ecological Resilience through the Lens of the Social Sciences: Contributions, Critical Reflections, and Constructive Debate Conceptualizing power to study social-ecological interactions (2016, background): “As noted previously, the various sources and dimensions of power can help to clarify and measure different aspects of adaptability, transformability, and resilience (Peterson 2000, Kofinas 2009, Pinkerton 2009, Crona and Bodin 2010, Duit et al. 2010, Westley et al. 2013, Olsson et al. 2014).”
- Defining tipping points for social-ecological systems scholarship—an interdisciplinary literature review (2018, background): “Transformations are fundamental reorganizations of a system (Gunderson and Holling 2002, Olsson et al 2014) that might involve rapid, non-linear change or not.”
- Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems (2017, background): “, how leaders directly or indirectly engage in creating, intervening in, and shaping networks [“network weaving,” see (43, 89, 94, 95)].”
- Ten essentials for action-oriented and second order energy transitions, transformations and climate change research (2018, background): “Importantly, sustainable human-environment relationships are also critical aspect of considerations of what counts as transformation, and ecological and environmental aspects cannot be ignored in the attempts to shape societal change [66].”
- How is innovation in aquaculture conceptualized and managed? A systematic literature review and reflection framework to inform analysis and action (2017, background): “SES analyses how socioeconomic and biophysical driving forces interact to influence system change and induce transformations in systems towards ecological sustainability and resilience (Olsson et al., 2014).”
- Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective (2017, background): “Many scholars in the field of both organisation and environmental change have described locked-in transition processes (e.g. Kotter 1995; Olsson, Galaz, and Boonstra 2014; Grin, Rotmans, and Schot 2010; Loorbach 2014).”
- Sustainability Transitions Research: Transforming Science and Practice for Societal Change (2017, background): “But often it is argued that transitions in social contexts are necessary to sustain the stability of ecosystems and/or enhance their capacity to deal with disturbances (through transformation) (90).”
- Designing transformative spaces for sustainability in social-ecological systems (2018, background): “Within the social-ecological systems (SES) research community, the idea of system transformation has been debated for more than a decade (Olsson et al. 2014).”