Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research

Abstract

The concept of resilience in ecology has been expanded into a framework to analyse human-environment dynamics. The extension of resilience notions to society has important limits, particularly its conceptualization of social change. The paper argues that this stems from the lack of attention to normative and epistemological issues underlying the notion of 'social resilience'. We suggest that critically examining the role of knowledge at the intersections between social and environmental dynamics helps to address normative questions and to capture how power and competing value systems are not external to, but rather integral to the development and functioning of SES.

Keywords

environmental change; human-environment; knowledge; power; resilience; social theory

Published in

Progress in Human Geography
2012, Volume: 36, number: 4, pages: 475-489 Publisher: SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD

UKÄ Subject classification

Social Sciences Interdisciplinary


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511425708

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/89337