Social-ecological Resilience Research Articles

Actor-Network Theory: Insights into the Study of Social-Ecological Resilience.

Actor-network theory, which emerged from science and technology studies in the 1980s, regards everything in the social and ecological systems as a continuous result of the network of relations where they are located. Social-ecological resilience, with its origins in systems ecology, focuses on the non-linear changing dynamics of social-ecological systems and their governance. Among them, social-ecological resilience study integrates different disciplines, backgrounds, and themes, which inevitably leads to the vagueness of its concept. Both actor-network theory and social-ecological resilience emphasize human-nature relationships and view social-ecological systems as dynamic and unpredictable "networks". Therefore, this paper explored the potential conceptual or theoretical underpinnings that actor-network theory can provide in social-ecological resilience through interdisciplinary research. Specifically, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 30 fishing households from Chang-shan Archipelago in Northeastern China. The obtained interview data were analyzed through thematic analysis, and three main themes were generated, including "heterogeneous networks", "agency", and "translation", which facilitated a reconceptualization of the three components of social-ecological resilience, namely, "linked social-ecological systems", "changing dynamics" and "the ability to maintain resilience", and also provided a new theoretical perspective on the adaptive governance of social-ecological systems.

Resilience to COVID-19 challenges: Lessons for school psychologists serving school-attending black South African youth aged 10 to 19 years old.

Several studies have highlighted the mental health challenges of children and youth during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period, especially, in relation to an escalation of depression, anxiety, and stress. Whilst this may be the reality, it is unfortunate that most of the studies adopt a psychopathological point of departure often portraying doom and gloom. Adopting a social ecological resilience perspective the author focuses on the resilience of school-attending black South African youth during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The Child and Youth Resilience Measurement (CYRM-28) was completed by 4165 respondents in grades 4 to 12 (females = 2431, 58.4%; males = 1734, 41.6%) from the Gauteng, Mpumalanga and North-West provinces in South Africa. The findings indicate that school psychologists must consider gender, age and school levels when they design school-based resilience programmes for black South African children. Particular emphasis should be placed on contextual resilience highlighting spiritual, religious, cultural and educational factors. A major lesson for school psychologists is to ensure that school-based resiliency programmes adopt a whole school approach that includes children, their families and local communities for the successful promotion of resilience during adverse situations as postulated by the social ecological resilience model.

The research on spatial-temporal evolution and influence factors of urban resilience: A case study in the Guangzhou metropolitan area

Resilience city, a new concept of city sustainable development, becomes one of the important subjects of high-quality development research. Compared to the traditional urban disaster mitigation approach, resilient cities focus more on the organizational capacity and coordination within the urban systems. Taking Guangzhou metropolitan area as an instance, which is featured a highly developed economy and society and frequently happened hazards and disturbances, the paper constructs an evaluation index system from four city subsystems, including economy, society, ecology, and engineering. Meanwhile, by applying the methods of global entropy weight, variation coefficient, geographic information system, and obstacle degree model, the paper explores the time changes, space evolution, and obstacle degree factors of city resilience in the Guangzhou metropolitan area from 2010 to 2020. The research results show that: (1) There is a significant change in the time difference of city comprehensive resilience of the Guangzhou metropolitan area. The resilience of each city’s resilience subsystem has grown steadily, of which the development level of economic resilience, social resilience, and engineering resilience has been steadily improved, and ecology resilience level shows a slight decline among a steadily increasing. (2) The overall city resilience of the Guangzhou metropolitan area shows a radial pattern taking Guangzhou as the core, of which the city economy, society, and engineering resilience grades mainly show a medium and low resilience level, the ecology resilience mainly shows a medium and high resilience level, and the general performance of resilience space distribution level is high in the southeast and low in the northwest. (3) Social resilience and ecological resilience are the main driving subsystems in the early and late stages of city resilience development in Guangzhou metropolitan area during the research period, and engineering resilience is the main constraint subsystem. (4) Water and soil loss control area and population density are the main obstacle factors in the early and late stages of city resilience in the Guangzhou metropolitan area. The density of the city drainage pipeline and the total import and export volume are the basic resilience barrier factors. The paper analyzes the spatial-temporal pattern and influencing factors of city resilience in the metropolitan area from a multi-dimensional perspective, provides a new thinking and analysis framework for the management and sustainability of city resilience in the metropolitan area, and provides a reference for the coordinated development of the metropolitan area.

Pre-planning transformation to avoid collapse—Is it possible?

Although societal collapse has been part of human history for millennia, a growing fear is that social, economic, technological, and environmental systems have become so globally interconnected, and their resilience so under threat, that the next collapse could be global in scale. Drawing from the collapse and social-ecological resilience studies literatures, we conceptualize two stages of collapse-avoidance governance—the pre-trigger adaptive governance stage during which policies draw on systems resilience to avoid the initiation of the collapse spiral, and the post-trigger transformative governance stage during which policies are implemented to steer out of the collapse spiral through fundamental change of systems regimes. Even under continued good collapse-avoidance governance it is possible for a variety of reasons that adaptive governance policies fail to avoid triggering of the collapse spiral, in which case policies to facilitate transformation will likely need to be substantially different. When designing adaptive governance resilience policies, therefore, governance institutions should anticipate these contingencies by (1) supporting research and design of transformation policies to implement if the resilience policies ultimately fail and the collapse spiral is triggered, and (2) accepting that effective transformation policies may depart significantly from, and even conflict with, the resilience policies. Even if the pre-planned transformation policies ultimately are not implemented amid a collapse spiral, the pre-planning exercise can sharpen focus on the need for design and implementation of effective resilience policies.

Microeconomic adaptation to severe climate disturbances on Australian coral reefs

Coral reefs are increasingly affected by climate-induced disturbances that are magnified by increasing ocean temperatures. Loss of coral reefs strongly affects people whose livelihoods and wellbeing depend on the ecosystem services reefs provide. Yet the effects of coral loss and the capacity of people and businesses to adapt to it are poorly understood, particularly in the private sector. To address this gap, we surveyed about half (57 of 109) of Australian reef tourism operators to understand how they were affected by and responded to severe impacts from bleaching and cyclones. Reef restoration and spatial diversification were the primary responses to severe bleaching impacts, while for cyclone-impacts coping measures and product diversification were more important. Restoration responses were strongly linked to the severity of impacts. Our findings provide empirical support for the importance of response diversity, spatial heterogeneity, and learning for social-ecological resilience.

Anti‐immigration policies of the trump administration: A review of Latinx mental health and resilience in the face of structural violence

AbstractPoor mental health outcomes are a growing concern among Latinx children and adults in the U.S. While existing research has documented risk factors to these mental health disparities, such as barriers to healthcare access and fear of deportation, less is known about the impacts of Former President Trump's anti‐immigrant rhetoric and federal efforts to curb migration on Latinx mental health. Thus, the purpose of this review was two‐fold: (1) to review the empirical literature for any quantitative or qualitative findings discussing the relationship between federal immigration policies passed under the Trump administration and mental health outcomes of the Latinx community and (2) to understand the range of resilience factors that may have facilitated Latinx youth and adults to overcome these sociopolitical changes. Utilizing a modified version of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta‐Analyses guidelines, we conducted a narrative review of 21 empirical articles. The review characterizes literature across the fields of psychology, counseling, social justice, and law in terms of population of interest, relevant immigration policy, key mental health findings, and culturally sensitive contributions to either the Minority Stress Model or Social Ecological Resilience. Based on our findings, we argue that immigration enforcement served as a unique stressor to Latinx wellbeing and particularly increased rates of negative emotional experiences and internalizing symptoms. However, culturally rooted resilience factors, such as Luchando Adelante (e.g., striving forward despite uncertainty), helped bolster against relevant adversity. We conclude with an argument for the importance of immigration policy reform for improved mental health outcomes in the Latinx community.

Resilience Processes Facilitating School Re-Entry among Rural Female High School Learners in South Africa

School dropout is a concern globally. In South Africa, approximately 60 per cent of young adults drop out before completing secondary school. Although much is known about school dropout, little is known about the factors that enable some learners to re-enter education after a period of dropout. In this qualitative descriptive study with 12 adolescent female learners from a rural school in Mpumalanga, South Africa, we sought to understand the social-ecological resilience processes that facilitated their re-entry after one to two years of dropout. The findings indicated several personal and relational resilience processes, including the learners’ desire for success and others’ encouragement of learners to focus on the future. Informed by the resilience and push–pull theories, the findings suggest that a collective narrative of education as being key to one’s future was powerful in facilitating educational re-entry. We argue that school social workers could cultivate this narrative to prevent school dropout and to facilitate the re-entry of dropped-out learners back into school.

Mapping a framework for social–ecological resilience in reimaging of abandoned spaces

Vacant spaces present affluent areas for the urban landscape. Considering these spaces from a resilience perspective is an effective strategy. This research seeks to assist decision-makers in assessing landscape resilience and drawing on landscape selection process requirements for changes. The current research investigates the review of previous studies and develops a contextual relationship-based model to analyze critical aspects through experts' opinions. The investigation approach was inspired by interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and MICMAC software. MICMAC analysis considered the direct and possible relationships of variables in the future, while the ISM technique discovered the hierarchy of these variables and their relationship with the main areas. Flexibility has the most effectiveness, while Activity has been affected by the most properties. Furthermore, even though it is significant, urban systems lose their flexibility and adaptability in the long run by focusing entirely on engineering measures.

Digital governance in rural Chengdu, China: Its potential for social-ecological resilience

In this study, we echo the call from the UN to interpret Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their regional context—in this case, the linpan (wooded lot) landscape of the Chengdu Plain, in Sichuan, China, where the shocks and stresses of recent, rapid administrative-economic urbanization are testing the resilience of some of the world's most sustainably productive and long- and densely-settled agrarian environments. In recent years, fine-grained information and communications technology (ICT) governance tools in Chengdu, such as “grid management”, present opportunities to sustain and scale up the collection of data necessary to validate and refine indicators of landscape resilience, and use them to regulate development, in accordance with SDG goal 11 to enhance legislation, governance, and capacity via information gathering and sharing. ICT-based governance in combination with traditional place-based knowledge can play a critical role in ensuring the resilience of urban-rural co-development. To realize this potential, however, ICT-enabled governance needs to incorporate greater transparency and more local feedback loops and enable greater participation from older farmers and women, to inform household and community-level land-use choices and initiatives. It also needs to link regulatory functions with marketing and pricing functions so that farmers may benefit from the sustainable practices they are encouraged to adopt.

The Role of Nature-Based Solutions in Supporting Social-Ecological Resilience for Climate Change Adaptation

Social-ecological systems underpinning nature-based solutions (NbS) must be resilient to changing conditions if NbS are to contribute to long-term climate change adaptation. We develop a two-part conceptual framework linking social-ecological resilience to adaptation outcomes in NbS. Part one determines the potential of NbS to support resilience based on assessing whether NbS affect key mechanisms known to enable resilience. Examples include social-ecological diversity, connectivity, and inclusive decision-making. Part two includes adaptation outcomes that building social-ecological resilience can sustain, known as nature's contributions toadaptation (NCAs). We apply the framework to a global dataset of NbS in forests. We find evidence that NbS may be supporting resilience by influencing many enabling mechanisms. NbS also deliver many NCAs such as flood and drought mitigation. However, there is less evidence for some mechanisms and NCAs critical for resilience to long-term uncertainty. We present future research questions to better understand how NbS can continue to support social-ecological systems in a changing world.

A Comprehensive Review of the Potential of Stepwells as Sustainable Water Management Structures

Throughout history, many water conservation and management strategies have been employed, but only a few have proved successful. Stepwells were one such effective water management technologies used in India. Stepwells were constructed based on their geographical and topographical suitability, which revealed socio-cultural behaviors and beliefs. They form a unique, efficient system of hydraulic engineering that demonstrates the region’s traditional understanding of the sustainable use and management of its land, water, and agricultural biodiversity. Ancient water harvesting techniques integrated stepwells into agricultural and irrigation networks using prefabricated structures, to allow open channel flow, networked with surface water bodies. They demonstrated the use of Persian wheels, non-mechanized farm machinery, other agricultural implements, etc., and their structure utilized a vast array of local building materials, including granite, marble, sandstone, bricks, lime, mud, wood, etc. The utilization of agricultural wastes, such as rice husk, in the production of lakhori bricks is strongly associated with circular economy principles. They not only communicated and guided communities regarding water management and cleaner production, but also revealed historic knowledge regarding how ancient societies achieved social-ecological resilience. In addition to that, in almost all types of stepwells, aesthetics and ornamentation played an important role and served as a rich source of history to disseminate knowledge of governance, political ideas, social practices and lifestyle. Just a few studies on these stepwells have been published and they have generally focused on their history or on the construction materials of a specific stepwell, rather than offering a wide perspective. This review article will explore the scientific, architectural, artistic, and functional dimensions of all major stepwells in India that have either disappeared or lost their relevance owing to expanding human population and environmental stress. Additionally, this will provide an opportunity to rethink modern water engineering systems and redesign water infrastructure with less negative environmental impacts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure water for all.

‘Rethinking the way we practice our professions’: social-ecological resilience for built environment professionals

ABSTRACT Urbanisation and industrialisation have contributed to significant and detrimental changes in the earth’s natural environments. The concept of social-ecological resilience can assist this problem, by integrating the consideration of human and ecological systems in decision-making. An implication is that built environment professionals must be competent in social-ecological resilience knowledge and skills to ensure cities are well adapted to current environmental challenges, and do not further contribute to them. Yet the capabilities of built environment professionals to incorporate resilience thinking (theory and knowledge) into their work (skills and practice), is not well understood and is not well addressed in education theory. This paper contributes to this gap by: exploring the social-ecological resilience knowledge, skills, and practical experience of Australian built environment professionals, thereby identifying gaps to address in further and higher education. Results indicate that built environment professionals’ know about social-ecological resilience, but they identify their practical experience is low. Additionally, respondents are more confident with their abilities, compared to colleagues, and their profession at large. The results indicate that further and higher education offerings (e.g. university education, continuing professional education, and practice) must assist built environment professionals to further develop social-ecological skills. As one respondent stated – it will require ‘rethinking the way we practice our professions’.

Stability and Resilience—A Systematic Approach

Stability and resilience are two crucial concepts to the proper functioning and understanding of the behavior of both natural and man-made systems exposed to perturbations and change. However, although the two have covered a similar territory within dynamic systems, the terminology and applications differ significantly. This paper presents a critical analysis of the two concepts by first collating the wealth of modern stability concept literature within dynamics systems and then linking it to resilience thinking, defined as adaptation where the system has the ability to respond perturbations and change through passive and active feedback structures. A lumped mass and simple pendulum, two simple linear and nonlinear dynamic systems following a state-space approach from modern control systems theory, are used to support the analysis and application. The research findings reveal that the two overarching categories of engineering resilience and socio-ecological resilience (extended ecological resilience) are in fact a reinvention of a closed-loop system dynamic stability with different types of active feedback mechanisms. Additionally, structural stability describes some vital aspects of social–ecological resilience such as critical thresholds where, under change, a system loses the ability to return to the starting form or move to another suitable form through active feedback mechanisms or direct management actions.

Conceptual framework to define management strategies for silvopastoral systems in native forests

Most of the native forests in Argentina are used for livestock production with little sustainable silvopastoral management. Our objective here is to discuss different management strategies where natural and human capital are combined to co-produce ecosystem services (ES) provided by silvopastoral systems in native forests, interacting with different ecosystem functions and biodiversity. Also, we provide perspectives that should be analyzed in a context of socio-ecological approaches in agro-forestry landscapes. Four types of theoretical strategies are proposed (win-win, win-lose, lose-win and lose-lose), which define the social-ecological and economic thresholds that determine the provision of ES and biodiversity in the long term. The evidence of the win-lose strategy occurs when the silvopastoral systems are managed mainly to increase economic profitability through increments in forage biomass aimed to increase livestock production in the medium and long term. Deferred deforestation was presented as a typical example of lose-lose strategy in the Chaco region based on short-term management strategies by only obtaining commodities (crops or livestock products) without considering the negative interactions with other ES and loss of biodiversity. The information provided in this work should assist stakeholders and researchers to identify thresholds of economic profitability and ecological resilience in ecosystems under management. The proposed approaches provide a utilitarian vision of ecosystem services and key aspects of social-ecological resilience.

Assessing Climate Change Adaptation and Risk Management Programmes: Stakeholder Participation Process and Policy Implications for Transport, Energy and Tourism Sectors on the Island of Sicily

Climate change is a critical sustainability challenge for islands and their main economic sectors. Rising sea levels, extreme temperatures, and drier conditions are the impacts with the most significant potential to amplify the economic damage on islands. However, their isolation and natural conditions bring about some leeway to respond to climate impacts on their terms. This paper aims to provide a local-level analysis and ranking of alternative adaptation pathways in an island context through the stakeholders’ lens. This study reviews the latest advancements in adaptation science and proposes a catalogue of adaptation and risk management options that feed a participatory assessment and ranking by local stakeholders. The research was conducted on the island of Sicily (Italy) and saw the participation of high-level experts and tourism, energy, and maritime transport representatives. It employs a sequential process of four ordered steps oriented towards adaptation planning and stakeholders’ engagement. The process reveals breaches between what stakeholders’ would prioritise when designing policy pathways and their opinion about the most beneficial and balanced adaptation programmes across the sustainability criteria. Results indicate that, according to stakeholders, the priorities are to prepare the energy, tourism, and maritime transport sectors to confront future climate-related events more efficiently. Other transformational actions to ensure long-term social-ecological resilience, which requires significant structural changes and substantial investments, are not at the core of the public needs.

Improving the framework for analyzing community resilience to understand rural revitalization pathways in China

Community resilience (CR) is receiving increasing attention within rural studies, especially as many rural communities, worldwide, appear to be gradually declining. In 2017, the Chinese government outlined a “rural revitalization strategy”, which recommends four pathways for revitalizing rural communities and helping them to withstand external shocks. To advance understanding of rural revitalization pathways in China, we developed an improved conceptual framework for analyzing CR. The study's innovativeness lies in its integration of principles for building social-ecological resilience into the framework, and the provision of a step-by-step process for analyzing CR. We analyzed major risks and shocks faced within each of the four revitalization pathways in China on the basis of a literature review, and identified key slow variables and their mutual effects as well as corresponding thresholds and core indicators. Our results showed that slow-onset disturbances, which differ greatly among the four pathways, pose the greatest threat to CR. However, the impacts of slow variables on rural communities are often ignored as they are difficult to observe. Therefore, rules should be introduced to avoid shortsighted decisions in policymaking. Our findings can provide valuable inputs for the implementation of rural revitalization pathways in China. Moreover, they highlight the need for more empirical case studies focusing on diversified pathways.

Exploring actor-network and space–time production for social-ecological resilience: case study on mangrove conservation in the North Coast of Java, Indonesia

Exploring actor-network and space–time production for social-ecological resilience: case study on mangrove conservation in the North Coast of Java, Indonesia

A Framework for Measuring Urban Vitality After COVID-19: Social-Ecological Resilience and Application

Urban vitality is the quality and the intensity of human activity within the urban space that represents the liveliness and the energy of cities. The spread of COVID-19 and the enforcement of social distancing policies have drastically reduced urban human activities and impacted the local economy, which has brought attention to the concept of urban resilience against COVID-19. Urban resilience can be understood as the capacity of a city’s systems to endure a crisis, minimize the impact of a crisis, and recover to a normal state from a crisis. The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively assess the levels of resilience of communities in Seoul, South Korea, using the social-ecological resilience model and the resistance-recovery ratio. The proposed framework for measuring resilience identifies the communities' capacity to resist the crisis, recover, and adapt to the recovered state, which provides a comprehensive understanding of urban resilience after COVID-19.

Rural older adults’ resilience in the context of COVID-19

Public health and media discourses have often portrayed older adults as a vulnerable group during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, some emerging research is showing that older adults are faring better in terms of their mental health when compared to their younger counterparts. Understanding older adults' mental well-being during the pandemic requires in-depth exploration of the different place-based resources and systems around them. In particular, rural older adults face distinct challenges and opportunities related to accessing valued resources to promote their well-being. Drawing together research on aging and multi-systemic resilience, we explored what strategies, resources, and processes rural older adults valued in the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of 51 semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted from May to August 2020 with 26 rural older adults in Manitoba, Canada. Despite adversities, participants drew on and developed resources at the individual, local, community, institutional, and societal level to support their well-being. Specifically, they identified individual strategies (e.g., positivity, acceptance, and gratitude), resources in their immediate environments (e.g., opportunities to keep busy, connect with friends, family and neighbours, and outdoor visits), and community organizations that contributed to their well-being. They also identified broader systems that shaped their resilience processes, such as access to health services, opportunities to volunteer and support others, media stories, reliable information, and public health policies and practices that value older adult lives. Importantly, some resources were less accessible to some participants, highlighting the need to develop strategies that address inequitable resources at different levels. By describing rural older adults’ resilience we seek to advance the growing body of research in relation to social ecological resilience that moves beyond a focus on individual characteristics to include understanding of the role of material, social, and cultural contexts.

Polycentric Collaborative Governance, Sustainable Development and the Ecological Resilience of Elevator Safety: Evidence from a Structural Equation Model

The goal of public security and safety under the concept of sustainable development has been transformed into the maximization of the comprehensive goal of economic, environmental, and social security and safety. The polycentric collaborative governance mode is a crucial approach for the reform of government regulation. Social–ecological resilience has become a typical paradigm in the field of risk governance. Polycentric collaborative governance and safety resilience are the foundation and booster of elevator safety governance. In this paper, we expound on the system elements and mechanisms of polycentric collaborative governance and ecological resilience of elevator safety under the guidance of sustainable development by using a conceptual framework method. On this basis, we explore the influence degree and mechanism of elevator safety polycentric collaborative governance on elevator safety ecological resilience under the guidance of sustainable development by constructing a structural equation model based on micro-survey data. The results show that (1) the polycentric collaborative governance subject composed of the government, business, society, and the public is the key force to enhancing the ecological resilience of elevator safety; (2) enhancing the ecological resilience of elevator safety has a significant direct promoting effect on improving the mitigation, recovery, learning, and coping ability of elevator safety; (3) improving the learning ability has a significant direct promoting effect on improving the mitigation, recovery, and coping ability of elevator safety; (4) improving the coping ability has a significant direct promoting effect on improving the mitigation and recovery ability of elevator safety; (5) improving the mitigation ability has a significant direct promoting effect on improving the recovery ability of elevator safety. Therefore, in the process of elevator safety governance under the guidance of sustainable development, we should not only adhere to the polycentric collaborative governance mode but also attach importance to the ecological resilience governance paradigm of elevator safety, which together can improve the elevator quality and safety level.