Access as the Means for Understanding Social-Ecological Resilience: Bridging Analytical Frameworks

Abstract

Social-Ecological Systems (SES) resilience has become the mainstream analytical framework for understanding the interactions between the social and environmental dynamics of change. However, issues around the role of power and agency, which have been described as blind spots by critics, have raised concerns regarding its application to real-world empirical cases. We explore how Ribot and Peluso’s Theory of Access can be applied to address critical theoretical gaps in SES by examining how its structural and relational access mechanisms relate to diversity, feedbacks and connectivity which are central to the dynamics of SES. Testing this through two different case studies, on land use issues in Mexico and marine fisheries in the United Kingdom, we illustrate how an analysis focused on access deepens our understanding of resilience. We argue that the insights provided by the Theory of Access contribute to an improved theorization of the “social” in social-ecological resilience.