ABSTRACT
Resilience, the ability to bounce back and withstand disruption, is increasingly at the centre of debates over development and responses to climate change. The Resilience Alliance defines the resilience of a social-ecological system (SES) as: “the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organise and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning)” (Resilience Alliance 2014). This definition resonates strongly with the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world where climate and other change processes threaten development progress and tensions exist between change and continuity. Like all high-level concepts however, translating resilience into practice requires frameworks that relate basic scientific understanding of SES dynamics to much more specific factors.
