Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems

A growing body of literature focuses on resilience, or the capacity of a social-ecological system to sustain itself in the face of disturbance and change. Resilience adds to the discussion of sustainability and environmental education research because: (1) social-ecological systems are constantly evolving in response to catastrophic and more gradual change, and resilience scholarship incorporates response to change; (2) resilience brings a complex systems theoretical framework, challenging environmental education researchers to consider the relationship of environmental learning and behaviours to attributes of resilient social-ecological systems (e.g., ecosystem services, innovative multi-functional governance structures, biological and cultural diversity, social capital); (3) resilience scholarship suggests approaches to studying coupled social-ecological systems, and integrating social with ecological perspectives is an important focus in environmental education and ESD; and (4) resilience research links learning to adaptive co-management and thus provides examples of learning situated in real-world environmental management contexts. The book presents a series of contributions integrating theory with reviews of empirical studies in natural resource management, youth and multi-generational, and higher education settings. It also integrates a growing literature on resilience and adaptive and social learning in natural resources management with research in environmental education and ESD. This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.