Resilience Alliance Members co-author 3 new papers produced for the Stockholm Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability, recently published in AMBIO: Westley et al. "Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation", Steffen et al. "The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship", Folke et al. "Reconnecting to the Biosphere".

 

 

Resilience Alliance Members participate in 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability, Stockholm, Sweden, May 16-19. The symposium "Transforming the World in an Era of Global Change" brought together Nobel laureates, renowned thinkers and experts on global sustainability to discuss new approaches to governing social-ecological systems.  

Applying a Social-ecological Inventory Workbook.  Written to supplement the resilience assessment practitioners workbook, "Applying a Social-ecological Inventory" describes in detail a pre-assessment method to help with identifying existing knowledge and activities already underway in a region, as well as the key actors involved with regards to a particular issue.

Visit resilience assessment to download this and other workbook files and to browse resilience assessment online resources.

 

Resilience Assessment Workbook for Practitioners Version 2.0.  A fully revised workbook complete with new examples, updated framework, and an expanded section on synthesizing the assessment findings provides an alternative way of thinking about and practicing natural resource management. 

Visit resilience assessment to download the workbook and browse new online resources including examples of key concept applications, an annotated bibliography, and an open database of resilience assessment projects.

Science, Society, Resilience and the Arts by Robyn Archer. An after-dinner talk at the Australia21 conference Shaping Australia's Resilience: Policy development for uncertain futures Canberra, Feb 18, 2010. "Robyn Archer is a well-known Australian singer, composer, theatre performer, festival director, and champion of the Arts. Her ideas on the nexus between science and the arts, and the role of resilience, are illuminating." - Brian Walker

E & S Feature Article: Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity addresses resilience at the global level for the first time.  Rockström introduces Planetary Boundaries in a whiteboard seminar: "These scientists propose that so far there are only 9 identifiable processes in the Earth system that have clear risk of causing disastrous or unacceptable, large threshold effects if we cross beyond safe boundaries."  A condensed version of the article published in Nature includes links to follow-up commentaries.

 

BOOKS (& more books)

 

Collaborative Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity:  

 

This book focuses on how crisis can offer opportunities for collaboration, consensus building, and transformative resilience. Contributors examine efforts to collaborate after natural disaster, technological failure, economic collapse, or acts of violence, and describe how communities have survived and even thrived by building trust and interdependence. Cases include environmental assessment in Cozumel, Mexico, governance of the Montana's Blackfoot Valley, fisheries management in Southeast Asia's Mekong region; and restoration of fire regimes in the U.S. For more information, go to the author's website.   

 

Social Network Analysis: A quantitative approach to the study of social relations  

In this book, edited by Orjan Bodin and Cristina Prell (2011), the use of the SNA in studying natural resource management is explored. The book shows how the relational approach gives the researcher the means to uncover and analyze the complex patterns of interactions among actors characterizing most real-world governance settings, and how this can be used to explain various governance outcomes, and also in furthering the development of different theoretical frameworks. The book is available here on the Cambridge University Press website.

 

Spatial Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems  By Graeme Cumming (2011). The first book to comprehensively cover the influence of spatial variation on the resilience of social-ecological systems.  From the publisher's website "This book will become a shining star, a classic in the explosion of new ideas and approaches to studying and understanding social-ecological systems" Carl Folke, Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience and Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics.

Foundations of Ecological Governance Edited by Lance Gunderson, Craig Allen, and C.S. Buzz Holling (2010). From the publisher's website "Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience - those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers."

 

 

Adaptive Capacity and Environmental Governance Edited by Derek Armitage and Ryan Plummer. From the publisher's website "This unique volume offers the first interdisciplinary and integrative perspective on an emerging area of applied scholarship, with contributions from internationally recognized researchers and practitioners. It demonstrates how adaptive capacity makes environmental governance possible in complex social-ecological systems." With case studies from a variety of different geographical settings.

 

Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship: Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World. The first textbook to take a resilience-based approach to natural resource management is now available from the publisher’s website. Written for students, researchers, and practitioners, the textbook links current research with practical applications for managing ecosystems in times of change and uncertainty. Edited by Resilience Alliance members Stuart F. Chapin, Gary Kofinas, and Carl Folke.

 

Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future Edited by Jon Norberg and Graeme Cumming. From the publisher's website "Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future is a hands-on treatment of this exciting new body of work and its applications, bridging the gap between theoretical and applied perspectives in the management of complex adaptive systems. Focusing primarily on natural resource management and community-based conservation, the book features contributions by leading scholars in the field, many of whom are among the leaders of the Resilience Alliance."

 

Institutions and Environmental Change: Principal Findings, Applications, and Research Frontiers Edited by Oran R. Young, Heike Schroeder and Leslie A. King, this book summarizes and reports the key findings of a decade of research on the role of institutions in addressing global environmental change. The international research project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) was carried out under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme. More information is on the MIT publishing website.

 

Resilience Thinking A book by CSIRO scientist and RA Program Director Brian Walker and science writer David Salt provides an accessible introduction to resilience research and argues for a dramatic change in how natural resources are managed. The resilience framework is explored by way of five case studies that demonstrate how communities are better able to withstand cycles of change when ecological drivers are better understood and when natural change is embraced rather than controlled. Copies of the book can be ordered online from Island Press

 

RA RESOURCES

Resilience Assessment Workbooks - The RA has developed two workbooks for assessing resilience in social-ecological systems - one for natural resource managers and practitioners and a second for research scientists. Both employ strategic questions and activities designed to explore system parameters and management options for social-ecological systems from a resilience perspective.

Join the RA's researcher database, submit your own profile, and search the database to find others working in your field. Anyone may submit their information for review and inclusion in the database. Database fields include: name, institution, position, country, geographic area of research, keywords, brief summary of research interests, and contact information.

 

Join the RA's email group for graduate students and post-docs doing resilience-related research. The email group is open to all graduate students/post-docs who are interested in discussing resilience research and sharing information on events, conferences, literature, etc. Read More.

 

Radio Feature: Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times. Mark Sommer, host of A World of Possibilities, interviewed researchers from around the world at the Resilience 2008 conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The 55 minute long show includes interviews with Buzz Holling, Brian Walker, Carl Folke, Charles Redman, Will Steffan and Frances Westley.