One Earth

Primer

Social Dimensions of Resilience

in Social-Ecological Systems
Joshua E. Cinner1,* and Michele L. Barnes1
1ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia

*Correspondence: joshua.cinner@jcu.edu.au
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.08.003

Resilience is generally considered the capacity to tolerate, absorb, cope with, and adjust to changing social
or environmental conditions while retaining key elements of structure, function, and identity. The social
dimensions of resilience are vital to understanding the impacts of environmental changes, such as climate
change, on social-ecological systems. In this Primer, we introduce key social factors that provide
resilience in linked social-ecological systems, including (1) assets, (2) flexibility, (3) social organization, (4)
learning, (5) socio-cognitive constructs, and (6) agency. Emerging frontiers of resilience include applying
social-ecological network approaches, investigating power relations, and exploring how transformative
versus adaptive changes can promote resilience. A further understanding of the social dimensions of
social-ecological systems can provide valuable information on how these systems may respond to change
and equip us with the knowledge to support or build resilience in vulnerable systems.

Introduction ing to the original state may be difficult or impossible. Thus,

Given the profound social, environmental, and climatic changes
that threaten human welfare and biodiversity, there is a growing
interest in the concept of resilience. In the social sciences, resil-
ience captures how people are affected by and respond to
change. Although definitions can vary, from this perspective re-
silience is generally considered the capacity to tolerate, absorb,
cope with, and adjust to changing social or environmental condi-
tions while retaining key elements of structure, function, and
identity. The concept of resilience has been used in social sci-
ence fields as diverse as psychology, economics, disaster
studies, law, public health, urban planning, and others to study
how people, and the social systems they are part of, are affected
by new policies, natural disasters, climate change, and a range
of other local to global changes. For example, in disaster studies,
resilience has been used to explore people’s resistance to and
recovery from cyclones, floods, and other extreme events. Crit-
ical to meeting societal grand challenges is the cross-fertilization
of ideas, such as resilience, across multiple disciplines, which
can help us to better understand, recognize, and apply solutions
across scales and contexts.
Indeed, scholarship on resilience is broader than the social
sciences and also has roots in engineering, mathematics, com-
plex systems, and ecology. In the 1950s, conceptualizations of
resilience, primarily from engineering, emphasized stability and
return time to an equilibrium state. By the 1970s, resilience
was viewed by ecologists as the capacity to persist and/or
absorb change while maintaining the same structure and func-
tion. This refinement emphasized the unpredictable and uncer-
tain nature of complex systems and shifted from a focus on sin-
gle equilibria to the idea that systems could have multiple self-
organized stable states, often far from equilibrium. A key aspect
of this resilience perspective that has permeated across multiple
disciplines is the recognition that once pushed beyond a
threshold, a system (which could range in scale from individual
to global) can ‘‘lock’’ into an alternative stable state, and return-
resilience is often described as the magnitude of change or
disruption that a system can absorb before shifting to an alterna-
tive regime or state (Figures 1A and 1B).
Although resilience is often considered a desirable attribute,
some applications emphasize that a system can be very resilient
in a state that is undesirable. For example, poverty traps are
extremely resilient situations that occur when an equilibrium
state of poverty becomes self-reinforcing through social and
behavioral feedbacks, such as distorted risk-taking behavior,
social exclusion, and a host of other mechanisms. Often exacer-
bated by social exclusion and a lack of access to credit, extreme
poverty can become reinforcing as the poor often seek to protect
scarce but crucial productive assets. This can result in the poor
pursuing lower-risk opportunities, even those that may keep
them in poverty, rather than pursuing riskier opportunities that
could potentially lift them out of poverty. For example, when
faced with declining yields, fishers stuck in a poverty trap might
remain in the fishery while wealthier fishers might exit the fishery
and pursue alternative livelihoods.
Linked Social-Ecological Systems
The social-ecological system concept explicitly recognizes that
people and nature are intricately connected. Human activities
alter the structure and function of ecosystems, which in turn pro-
vide people with ecosystem goods and services that contribute
to human well-being (Figure 2). For example, coral reefs provide
many tropical societies with fish to eat, coastal protection from
storms, and cultural services such as a sense of identity and
place, all of which contribute to the well-being of coastal com-
munities (Figure 2). However, in many locations reefs are directly
affected by climate change, overfishing, and land-based pollut-
ants. These direct (proximate) drivers are shaped by indirect
(distal) socioeconomic forces, such as markets, technology, so-
cioeconomic development, and institutions, among others
(Figure 2). These distal forces do not necessarily have direct

One Earth 1, September 20, 2019 ª 2019 Elsevier Inc. 51


A Figure 1. Ball-and-Cup Resilience Heuristic
B different basin of attraction after a disturbance.
C
impacts on the environment, but rather tend to affect ecosys-
tems by mediating proximate drivers. For example, having
more or less money in a bank account does not directly affect
the number of fish on a coral reef, but whether someone is weal-
thy or poor may influence whether they go fishing and how often.
These interdependent relationships between people and eco-
systems can help to provide resilience. For example, tight-knit
social structures can help to build trust and provide avenues to
resolve conflicts over resources, thereby leading to improved
ecological conditions that are more likely to support the sus-
tained provision of ecosystem services through times of change.
However, feedback and non-linear dynamics between social
and ecological domains can also reinforce an undesirable sys-
tem state. Root causes, or distal social, economic, cultural,
and institutional forces (such as poverty and missing institu-
tions), shape the proximate human activities (such as overhar-
vesting) that directly affect ecosystems (Figure 2). In some
cases, resultant ecosystem degradation creates negative feed-
backs that reinforce the original condition. These reinforcing so-
cial-ecological dynamics can deepen an undesirable state that
may make it difficult or impossible to reverse, which is referred
to as a social-ecological trap (Figure 1C). For example, in South-
west Madagascar already poor farmers became highly risk
averse after exposure to recurrent droughts and crop failures.
This resulted in behaviors that not only depleted environmental
conditions but also inhibited improvements in agricultural pro-
duction even when environmental conditions would allow for it,
thereby creating a reinforcing cycle of poverty and environ-
mental destruction that locked them into an undesirable and
less productive stable state.
Social Factors that Provide Resilience
Understanding the social factors that can help build (or under-
mine) resilience in social-ecological systems is an ongoing
52 One Earth 1, September 20, 2019
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(A and B) The state of the system is depicted as ball
and cups representing different basins of attraction
(referred to as alternative stable states). In (A), a
resilient system is depicted by a deep cup, which
means that the ball remains in the basin of attraction
after a disturbance (in red). In (B), lower resilience is
depicted by a shallower cup, which results in the
ball moving across a threshold (dashed line) to a
(C) A social-ecological trap, created when social
and ecological feedbacks further entrench an
undesirable system state. This is illustrated by a
deepening of the basin of attraction created by re-
inforcing social and ecological dynamics. Critically,
the system is more resilient but in a way that is often
perceived as undesirable to at least some actors.
research agenda. Here, we focus on six
broad domains of social factors that
create resilience to social-ecological
change, often referred to as adaptive ca-
pacity. These are (1) the assets that people
can draw upon, (2) the flexibility to change
strategies, (3) the ability to organize and
act collectively, (4) learning to recognize
and respond to change, (5) the socio-
cognitive constructs that enable or constrain human behavior,
and (6) the agency to determine whether to change or not
(Figure 3).
Assets
People are generally more resilient to social-ecological changes
when they can access a diversity of financial, technological, ser-
vice-related (i.e., health care), and other types of assets. For
example, as climate change shifts the range of many key fish-
eries species, fishers with access to financial and technical as-
sets can follow moving stocks by buying larger boats and fish
freezers that allow them to take fishing trips that are longer and
farther afield. Thus, it is generally assumed that the wealthy are
more resilient and better able to adapt to change. However, so-
cial-ecological linkages can mean that assets that enhance peo-
ple’s ability to exploit natural resources may actually reduce re-
silience by undermining the long-term sustainability of
ecosystems. For example, Tanzanian fishers who had assets
but lacked flexibility to change livelihood strategies were more
likely to intensify fishing effort in response to lower catches
(thereby increasing exploitation). Because they lacked alterna-
tives, these fishers were likely to use their assets to catalyze a
‘‘social-ecological trap’’ (Figure 1C), whereby lower yields
increased fishing exploitation, which in turn further decreased
yields.
Flexibility
Flexibility reflects the capacity of both individuals and institutions
to deal with change by being able to switch between strategies.
Flexibility is closely related to the idea of having diversity and
redundancy in a system to provide a sort of ‘‘insurance’’ that
can prevent shocks from having catastrophic consequences.
For example, some coastal households in Madagascar that
were heavily involved in vanilla farming dealt with a 10-fold
drop in the price of vanilla by diverting their efforts to the fishery.
Likewise, institutions can manage shocks and perturbations by
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Figure 2. A Heuristic Coral-Reef Social-Ecological System

Proximate drivers (B) are the human activities that directly affect coral reefs, such as overfishing, land-based pollution, and climate change. Distal drivers (A) are
structural traits in social systems that influence how people interact with coral reefs by mediating the proximate drivers. Ecosystems (C) not only are affected by
human activities but also provide society with goods and services (D) that contribute directly to human well-being (E). Arrows indicate connections between
system components. Adapted from Cinner and Kittinger (2015).

adjusting rules, boundaries, partners, and membership. Flexi-
bility is not only a function of the diversity of options available
but also reflects people’s ability and willingness to engage these
alternatives, and consequently it can be constrained by internal
factors such the extent to which their identity is tied to occupa-
tion or place. Specifically, people’s ability to re-imagine them-
selves in other roles can be limited by strong occupational iden-
tity or place attachment.
Social Organization
The way that society is organized can enable or inhibit resil-
ience by influencing whether and how people share knowl-
edge, cooperate, and access resources beyond their immedi-
ate domain. The formal and informal relationships that support
these key social processes include both social networks and
institutions, which can operate at different scales. For
example, recovering from natural disasters often requires
not only individual people to help each other out but also state
agencies to coordinate relief efforts. Social and institutional
links between actors operating within and across different
scales can also build the foundation for more participatory
and deliberative forms of governance where decision making
is distributed among groups of people with varying sources
of authority to act. Such forms of governance, often referred
to as ‘‘polycentric governance,’’ are argued to be better
equipped to promote resilience because they are more flex-
ible, they bridge diverse perspectives, and they can enable
solutions that are better fit to the scale of the problems they
seek to address.
Learning
Learning reflects people’s capacity to recognize change,
attribute this change to causal factors, and assess potential
response strategies. Importantly, learning is not solely about
access to information but rather captures the experiential
and experimental processes that enable people to frame or
reframe problems. In the context of social-ecological systems,
learning can help to build awareness of complex linkages and
feedbacks between people and ecosystems (e.g., those in
Figure 2) that may help to build or erode resilience over

One Earth 1, September 20, 2019 53


time. A critical part of learning thus includes memory, which
can not only provide resilience from past experiences but
also prevent shifting baselines that could mask the magnitude
of change. In some cases, political, cultural, or religious be-
liefs can influence people’s openness to generate, absorb,
and process information about social-ecological change.
Socio-cognitive Constructs
Resilience is also shaped by subjective socio-cognitive dimen-
sions, such as risk attitudes, personal experience, perceived so-
cial norms, and cognitive biases. Risk attitudes include percep-
tions about the probability and severity of risk associated with
change as well as the costs and benefits associated with adapt-
ing. Personal experience, cognitive biases, and perceived social
norms can profoundly affect risk attitudes and whether they help
to build or erode resilience. For example, preparedness for, and
adaptive action in the face of, extreme events has been positively
correlated with the physical closeness and intensity of previous
related experiences. Yet research on wildfires has found that in
some cases, cognitive biases have led to the intensity of previ-
ous experience actually reducing wildfire preparedness, instead
leading to fatalistic attitudes in the face of what is perceived as
random and uncontrollable risk. The profound effects of
perceived social norms on risk attitudes are perhaps most salient
in relation to climate change, where despite an overwhelming
scientific consensus, stark divisions remain across vast seg-
ments of society about the perceived risks of climate-induced
impacts and the costs and benefits of taking action.
54 One Earth 1, September 20, 2019
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Figure 3. Six Domains of Social Factors that
Provide Resilience
These are often referred to as adaptive capacity:
assets, flexibility, social organization, learning,
socio-cognitive constructs, and agency. The six
domains are interlinked; feedbacks and inter-
actions can occur among any of the domains and
not just the neighboring ones graphically repre-
sented by connecting arrows. Adapted from Cinner
et al. (2018).
Agency
Social resilience requires that people have
the power and freedom to mobilize their
assets, flexibility, social organization,
learning, and socio-cognitive capacities
to actively shape their future. Agency re-
flects people’s free choice in responding
to social-ecological changes and encom-
passes aspects of empowerment and
self-efficacy. Agency also captures peo-
ple’s belief in their own ability to manage
prospective situations and control the
events that affect them, which is closely
linked to the cognitive dimensions of resil-
ience discussed above. For example, in
fishing communities, households with
positive perceptions about their ability to
handle adverse events were more likely
to engage in adaptive responses to
shocks that reduced their reliance on fish-
ing. Agency provides a key conceptual dif-
ference between social and ecological resilience; the same
response to a situation can be considered either resilient or not
resilient depending entirely on someone’s agency. For example,
is a fisher considered resilient if he exits or remains in the fishery
following a major policy change? The answer likely depends on
the fisher’s agency: whether he was free to leave or was forced
out.
Exploring Resilience with Social-Ecological Networks
An emerging area of research examines the ways in which
social-ecological connectivity (i.e., networks) supports resil-
ience. These social-ecological network approaches are
grounded in an understanding that complex interdepen-
dencies between people and ecosystems (e.g., the linkages
and feedbacks depicted in Figure 4) can have dramatic effects
on how social-ecological systems, and the people within
those systems, behave both in general and in response to
change. These complex interdependencies can be modeled
and analyzed as social-ecological networks comprising nodes
and links (see Figure 4) that capture key relationships that are
important for supporting particular behaviors or outcomes.
For example, cooperative relationships between competing
fishers that target the same fish species have been shown
to be important for supporting fish biomass and functional di-
versity in reefs, which are critical for supporting social-ecolog-
ical resilience, particularly in resource-dependent coastal
communities. The social-ecological network approach offers
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an exciting research frontier that helps to disentangle the
complexity of social-ecological systems. In doing so, it can
demonstrate how different types of connectivity between peo-
ple and ecosystems affect resilience within and across scales
and contexts.
Missing Links and Future Directions in Social-Ecological
Resilience
A critical gap in resilience scholarship is inadequate consider-
ation of politics and power relations. Resilience often has norma-
tive dimensions, which assume there is a ‘‘desired state’’ (such
as a resilient system, community, or household). Yet power dy-
namics often mean that the elite rather than the marginalized
determine what is considered desirable or not. There is a need
for reflection on how social differentiation, power dynamics,
and politics affect discourses that shape the very concept of re-
silience, as well as perceptions of what is considered desirable
and for whom. The division of power also shapes how resources
are accessed and employed in response to disturbances. For
example, action in response to the climate crisis is often heavily
constrained in the Global North not due to a lack of capacity but
rather to a lack of political will to address climate change. A crit-
ical social resilience research frontier is exploring how power dy-
namics shape how people, communities, institutions, and social-
ecological systems can initiate and steer desirable change.
As society confronts global challenges such as climate
change, a contentious frontier is whether resilience includes
both (1) adaptation, which is described as absorbing, accommo-
dating, or embracing change while continuing to develop within
the same (desirable) basin of attraction, and (2) transformation,
which is described as fundamentally reorganizing (i.e., shifting
to a new, desirable basin of attraction) as a response to chal-
lenges that are impossible to address within a current regime.
Broadly speaking, adaptation often captures incremental adjust-
ments taken in response to disturbances (social or ecological,
internally or externally driven); conversely, the notion of transfor-
mation focuses on more fundamental changes, such as fostering
Figure 4. An Illustrative Example of a Social-
Ecological Network in Coral Reefs
Circles and fish icons represent nodes and the lines
between them represent links. In this example, the
social network (a) captures cooperative communi-
cation relationships between reef fishers using a
variety of fishing gears, the ecological network (b)
captures trophic interactions among target spe-
cies, and the social-ecological ties (x) link fishers
to the fish they target. The multilevel structure of
the social-ecological network (a, x, b) captures the
dependencies that exist within the system, i.e., how
key social and ecological system elements relate
to, and depend on, each other both within and
across levels. This example represents a fairly low
level of aggregation, where nodes and links are
clearly defined at a relatively small scale. However,
numerous types of interdependencies between
social and ecological nodes and links operating at
various scales can be investigated through a
social-ecological network approach. Adapted from
Barnes et al. (2019).
systemic reform and creating genuinely alternative futures. The
concepts of resilience and transformation are related but not
synonymous. In some cases, radical change can build on the
synergy of marginal change, and thus certain adaptation path-
ways can lay the foundation for transformation. In other cases,
perverse outcomes can occur when attempts to build resilience
in one domain further entrench the status quo of unsustainable
actions that stand in the way of fundamental (transformative)
changes. Cross-scale linkages also mean that resilience at one
scale may depend on transformations at another. For example,
resilience of global earth systems is dependent on transforma-
tions to sustainable energy and land use sectors. A key unan-
swered question relating to resilience and transformations is
whether different (or the same) capacities and conditions are
needed to enable transformative versus adaptive actions.
Recent work from across sociology, human ecology, and politi-
cal science has begun to develop theoretical insights regarding
how different types of learning (e.g., single, double, or triple-
loop) and network structures (e.g., bonding, bridging, and link-
ing) may be more relevant for supporting transformative (versus
adaptive) action. However, distinguishing between such capac-
ities has been particularly challenging, in part because there are
still ongoing debates about what constitutes transformation
versus adaptation, making it difficult to judge empirically whether
an action, intervention, or policy is transformational in character.
Thus, a fruitful future direction is refining what constitutes trans-
formative (versus adaptive) change in different contexts and
empirically demonstrating if and when different enabling factors
do indeed support (or hinder) it.
Resilience is applied across broad domains of public policy to
confront many of society’s grand challenges, such as climate
change, environmental degradation, and poverty alleviation.
However, crucial to the success of many of these resilience-
building efforts is a better understanding of the social factors
that promote resilience, as well as the associated linkages and
feedbacks within social-ecological systems. Emerging frontiers
of social-ecological networks, power relations, and
One Earth 1, September 20, 2019 55

transformation will help scholars and practitioners grapple with
what resilience is, who gets to define it, and who wins and loses
when resilience gets promoted. Indeed, the interdisciplinary ef-
forts by scholars and practitioners to understand and apply resil-
ience thinking may have lessons for confronting a multitude of
society’s grand challenges.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Graeme Cumming, Jessica Blythe, and Katrina Brown for insightful
comments. This work was supported by grants from the Australian Research
Council (CE140100020, FT160100047, and DE190101583), the Pew Chari-
table Trust, and the Worldfish FISH CRP Project.
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