Governing long-term social-ecological change: What can the resilience and transitions approaches learn from each other?

Addressing challenges of maintaining social welfare and opportunity in the face of severe ecological pressures requires frameworks for addressing and governing long-term social-ecological change. This paper analyses what two recent frameworks could learn from each other. The first aims to understand transitions in socio-technical systems, by analysing dynamic interactions between three levels: niches, socio-technical regimes and landscape. This has led to the concept of transition management as a process of shaping or modulating socio-technical regimes towards long-term sustainability goals. The second focuses on resilience and adaptive capacity, by analysing wider social-ecological systems in terms of their ability to absorb disturbance, self-organise and build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation. This approach views management interventions as experiments from which successive interventions can be adapted to more effectively manage socio-ecological systems. Though usually applied in different domains, the two conceptual frameworks share a focus on the ability of systems to learn and develop adaptive capacity whilst facing external shocks and long-term pressures, and aim to integrate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Both frameworks share an emphasis on learning from experimentation in complex systems, but the transitions framework focuses more on the ability to steer long-term changes in system functions, whilst the resilience framework emphasises maintenance of system functions in the face of external change. The combination of iterative learning and stakeholder participation from the resilience framework has the potential to incorporate vital feedbacks into transitions management, which in turn offers a longer-term perspective from which to learn about and manage socio-technical change. The paper argues that by combining insights from both frameworks, it may be possible to foster more robust and resilient governance of social-ecological systems, than could be achieved by either approach alone.