Stringer, Lindsay C.; Quinn, Claire H. Quinn1; Le, Hue T. V.; Msuya, Flower E.; Pezzuti, Juarez; Dallimer, Martin; Afionis, Stavros; Berman, Rachel J.; Orchard, Steven; Rijal, Moti L.
Description:
Managing integrated social-ecological systems to reduce risks to human and environmental
well-being remains challenging in light of the rate and extent of undesirable changes that are occurring.
Developing frameworks that are sufficiently integrative to guide research to deliver the necessary insights
into all key system aspects is an important outstanding task. Among existing approaches, resilience and
nexus framings both allow focus on unpacking relationships across scales and levels in a system and
emphasize the involvement of different groups in decision making to different extents. They also suffer
weaknesses and neither approach puts social justice considerations explicitly at its core. This has important
implications for understanding who wins and loses out from different decisions and how social and ecological risks
and trade-offs are shared and distributed, temporally and spatially. This paper conceptually integrates resilience
and nexus approaches, developing a combined framework and indicating how it could effectively be
operationalized in cases from mountain and mangrove social-ecological systems. In doing so, it advances
understanding of complex social-ecological systems framings for risk-based decision making beyond that which
could be achieved through use of either resilience or nexus approaches alone. Important next steps in testing the
framework involve empirical and field operationalization, requiring interdisciplinary, mixed method approaches.