Governance and the Capacity to Manage Resilience in Regional Social-Ecological Systems

By L. Lebel, J. Marty Anderies, B. Campbell, Carl Folke, S. Hatfield-Dodds, Terry P. Hughes, James A. Wilson. 2006

1,416 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The sustainability of regional development can be usefully explored through several different lenses. In situations in which uncertainties and change are key features of the ecological landscape and social organization, critical factors for sustainability are resilience, the capacity to cope and adapt, and the conservation of sources of innovation and renewal. However, interventions in social-ecological systems with the aim of altering resilience immediately confront issues of governance. Who decides what should be made resilient to what? For whom is resilience to be managed, and for what purpose? In this paper we draw on the insights from a diverse set of case studies from around the world in which members of the Resilience Alliance have observed or engaged with sustainability problems at regional scales. Our central question is: How do certain attributes of governance function in society to enhance the capacity to manage resilience? Three specific propositions were explored: (1) participation builds trust, and deliberation leads to the shared understanding needed to mobilize and self-organize; (2) polycentric and multilayered institutions improve the fit between knowledge, action, and social-ecological contexts in ways that allow societies to respond more adaptively at appropriate levels; and (3) accountable authorities that also pursue just distributions of benefits and involuntary risks enhance the adaptive capacity of vulnerable groups and society as a whole. Some support was found for parts of all three propositions. In exploring the sustainability of regional social-ecological systems, we are usually faced with a set of ecosystem goods and services that interact with a collection of users with different technologies, interests, and levels of power. In this situation in our roles as analysts, facilitators, change agents, or stakeholders, we not only need to ask: The resilience of what, to what? We must also ask: For whom?

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88e1a9b0d71d5f5f21009f85958ee66bc1a24d63

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Citations in the corpus

Legitimate adaptive flood risk governance beyond the dikes: the cases of Hamburg, Helsinki and Rotterdam (2014, result): “Adger, 2009; Paavola, 2008; Bäckstrand, 2006; Juhola and Westerhoff, 2011) and adaptive governance (e.g. Folke et al., 2005; Lebel et al., 2006) often stresses the importance of participatory and deliberative processes, our research results suggest that participatory and deliberative models of democ”
Resilience and robustness in policy design: a critical appraisal (2017, background): “Finally, a focus on robustness also characterizes some streams of research in political economy, where robustness means ‘the ability of various political economic arrangements to generate prosperity in the face of less than ideal conditions’ (Leeson and Subrick 2006, p. 107).”
Environmental governance and its implications for conservation practice (2012, background): “Management interventions also involve uncertainty, negotiation, deliberation, and sensitivity to social–ecological dynamics (Lebel et al. 2006).”
Exploring Social Resilience in Madagascar’s Marine Protected Areas (2009, methodology): “Scientists, governments, and natural resource managers have become increasingly interested in applying resilience to conservation initiatives by actively managing for the resilience of social-ecological systems (Hughes et al. 2005, Lebel et al. 2006, Marshall and Marshall 2007).”
Regional economic resilience in China: measurement and determinants (2021, background): “Resilience is emphasized because strengthening a society’s capacity to manage resilience is critical for effectively pursuing sustainable development (Lebel et al., 2006).”
Anticipatory Learning for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience (2010, background): “Today’s notion of managing for resilience entails both building and eroding resilience, the latter in the case of adverse system configurations (Lebel et al. 2006).”
A framework for urban climate resilience (2012, background): “Local policy decisions, for example, may ignore the tenure claims of marginal groups, deny them access to supportive urban services, or subject them to involuntary climate risks while other groups are protected (Lebel et al., 2006; Moser & Satterthwaite, 2010).”
Evaluating Successful Livelihood Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change in Southern Africa (2010, background): “…the resilience of social-ecological systems (Adger 2000, Gunderson and Holling 2001, Walker et al. 2004, Cumming et al. 2006, Kinzig et al. 2006, Lebel et al. 2006) suggest that many resource management practices lead to locked-in patterns of resource use that are detrimental to the ability to…”
Exploring Panarchy in Alpine Grasslands: an Application of Adaptive Cycle Concepts to the Conservation of a Cultural Landscape (2012, background): “…an integrated theory on resilience of SES attempt to explain how and under what conditions ecological systems and communities adjust and adapt or dramatically change their self-organization in response to slow changing variables or shocks (Lebel et al. 2006, Olsson et al. 2006, Walker et al. 2006).”
Network structure and institutional complexity in an ecology of water management games (2014, background): “By considering multiple collective-action problems and institutions, the EG framework extends the idea of polycentric governance (Ostrom et al. 1961), which is a long-standing theme in the SES literature (Lebel et al. 2006).”
Resilience in agri-food supply chains: a critical analysis of the literature and synthesis of a novel framework (2018, background): “(2006), Manyena (2006), Jüttner (2005), Lebel et al. (2006), Kleindorfer and Saad (2005), Fraser et al. (2005), Cox and Chickssnd (2005), Carvalho et al. (2005), Sheffi and Rice (2005), Fiksel (2003), Milestad and Darnhofer (2003) 62 45.2 D ow nl oa de d by L ou gh bo ro ug h U ni ve rs ity A t 0…”