Resilience 2011: Resilience, innovation and sustainability - Navigating the complexities of global change

The aim of "Resilience, Innovation and Sustainability: Navigating the Complexities of Global Change'' is to advance understanding of the relationships among resilience, vulnerability, innovation and sustainability. It will do so by bringing together scientists to share their work on the dynamics of interconnected social-ecological systems. A key outcome of conference discussions will be the development and refinement of new ideas for meeting the challenge of global change.

Themes of the conference:

1. Adaptation, resilience, vulnerability, and coping with change in social-ecological systems

Papers and panels in this theme will emphasize how people, groups, organizations, and systems experience vulnerabilities, build resilience, and adapt in the face of change. This theme seeks to integrate thinking across social and biophysical sciences – especially across resilience-based system-level conceptions of vulnerability, adaptation and geographical-science-based household-level conceptions of these issues.

2. Thresholds and regime shifts in social-ecological systems

Papers and panels in this theme will emphasize developing understanding of how social-ecological systems self-organize within regimes, endogenously generate thresholds that define different regimes and how systems undergo shifts between them. Of special interest is the idea of regimes and regime shifts in social systems – e.g. social traps.

3. Knowledge, innovation, and social-ecological learning

Papers and panels in this theme will emphasize developing understanding of the role that knowledge plays in the self-organization and dynamics of social-ecological systems as well as the dynamics of knowledge itself as generated by the processes of learning and innovation. Papers and panels will also address learning and innovation as endogenous processes generated by social-ecological dynamics.

4. Governance, polycentricity, markets, and multilevel challenges

Papers and panels in this theme will emphasize developing understanding of how institutions and governance structures influence the self-organization and dynamics of social-ecological systems. Of particular interest is the interaction of multiple, polycentric systems operating across multiple levels of organization and multiple temporal and spatial scales.

5. Analyzing and framing resilient development, resilient resources and security

Papers and Panels in this theme will emphasize resilience as it relates to management questions related to specific resource systems (fisheries, forests, rangelands, etc.), economic development, and human security and well-being. Topics may also include resilience and state security and the broadening and deepening of security to encompass new arenas such as the outcome of global financial crises, civil contingencies and human security. This theme is motivated by the fact that the term resilience is being used more widely in policy circles and policy debates to describe goals for government policy, yet the meaning may be at odds with resilience theories that emphasize change and transformation.

6. Transformation in social-ecological systems

Papers and panels in this theme will emphasize transformational change. When does further adaptation mean maladaptation? How can we identify when transformational change is necessary? What are the elements of transformability and the processes involved in transforming? How does it relate to the broader body of work on transitioning (e.g. the Transition Town movement in the UK and the DRIFT program in the Netherlands)?