Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective

Scholars and policy makers are becoming increasingly interested in the processes that lead to transformations toward sustainability. We explored how resilience thinking, and a stronger focus on social-ecological systems, can contribute to existing studies of sustainability transformations. First, we responded to two major points of critique: the claim that resilience theory is not useful for addressing sustainability transformations, and that the role of "power" in transformation processes has been underplayed by resilience scholars. Second, we highlighted promising work that combines insights from different theoretical strands, a strategy that strengthens our understanding of sustainability transformations. We elaborated three research areas on which such combined perspectives could focus: innovation and social-ecological-technological systems interactions, patterns of transformation, and agency and transformation.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Ecology and Society

• Publication date

  2014-10-14

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Economics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5751/ES-06799-190401
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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