About RA

The Resilience Alliance is a research organization comprised of scientists and practitioners from many disciplines who collaborate to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems.  The body of knowledge developed by the RA, encompasses key concepts of resilience, adaptability and transformability and provides a foundation for sustainable development policy and practice.
 

Our approach involves three main strategies:

• Contributing toward theoretical advances in the dynamics of complex adaptive systems
• Supporting rigorous testing of theory through a variety of means, including: participatory approaches to regional case-studies, adaptive management applications, model development, and the use of scenarios and other envisioning tools
• Developing guidelines and principles that will enable others to assess the resilience of coupled human-natural systems and develop policy and management tools that support sustainable development

Our unique niche:

As a deliberately small yet extensively networked organization, the RA is highly adaptable and able to seek out opportunities for new ways of learning about and applying resilience theory.

• RA members are leaders in the ecological and social sciences, covering a range of disciplinary expertise
• Our work fortifies a paradigm shift in natural resource management from top-down, command-and-control optimization (the MSY paradigm), to the promotion of resilience and self-organization
• We have extensive experience engaging stakeholders involved in resource management and planning processes in an Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (AEAM) framework as well as in the developing area of adaptive governance
• RA members have in-depth knowledge of social-ecological systems in Australia, Africa, South East Asia, South America, the USA and Europe, in a variety of terrestrial and aquatic systems used for both production and conservation
• We are continually exploring new ways of communicating and building connections among researchers and practitioners to improve access to new knowledge and ideas
• The RA brings research findings to the attention of policy- and decision-makers at all levels

Governance:

Established in 1999, the RA is supported by an international network of member institutions that includes universities, government, and non-government agencies. The Board of Directors includes a representative from each member organization. Board members elect a subset of members to serve as the executive and deputy assistants. An Executive Director oversees the administrative structure of the Alliance and a Communications Director co-ordinates the Communications and Extension Program.

Glossary:

Adaptability – the capacity of actors in a system to manage resilience, either by moving the system toward or away from a threshold that would fundamentally alter the properties of the system, or by altering the underlying features of the stability landscape (change the positions of thresholds, and the ease of movement of the system).

Adaptive Cycle - a metaphor of systemic change that proposes that systems cycle through four phases: rapid growth, conservation, collapse, and re-organization.

Complex Adaptive Systems – systems with inherent uncertainty in their dynamics that tend to have multiple stable states and that exhibit self-organisation.

Panarchy – a nested set of adaptive cycles at different scales, that exhibits cross-scale interactions.

Resilience – the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, undergo change and still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.

Social-ecological system – an integrated system in which the dynamics of the social and ecosystem domains are strongly linked and of equal weight .

Transformability – the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, social and/or economic conditions make the existing system untenable.