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Measuring Social-Ecological Resilience Reveals Opportunities for Transforming Environmental Governance

Resource type
Date created
2019-09-01
Authors/Contributors
Abstract
Understanding the resilience of social-ecological systems can advance our ability to transform environmental governance and achieve ecologically sustainable and socially just outcomes. However, measuring this multidimensional emergent system property has been elusive. We translated theoretical principles of resilience into ecological and social metrics and used expert knowledge to assess how they have changed through three sequential governance regimes of the Pacific herring fishery in northwestern Canada. We showed a significant reduction in system-wide resilience between previous Indigenous and historical colonial governance regimes, and limited change with the onset of the latest environmental justice era. We also detected recent signs of recovery among several metrics of resilience, thereby signaling that this system exhibits the preconditions for governance transformation. Pinpointing the erosion and recovery of attributes that confer social-ecological resilience can reveal leverage points and highlight strategic pathways to enable deliberate transformation toward a more ecologically sustainable and socially just future.
Document
Published as
Salomon, A. K., A. E. Quinlan, G. H. Pang, D. K. Okamoto, and L. Vazquez-Vera. 2019. Measuring social-ecological resilience reveals opportunities for transforming environmental governance. Ecology and Society 24(3):16. DOI: 10.5751/ES-11044-240316
Publication title
Ecology and Society
Document title
Measuring social-ecological resilience reveals opportunities for transforming environmental governance
Date
2019
Volume
24
Issue
3
First page
16
Publisher DOI
10.5751/ES-11044-240316
Copyright statement
Copyright is held by the author(s).
Scholarly level
Peer reviewed?
Yes
Language
English
Download file Size
ES-2019-11044.pdf 1.58 MB

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