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Resilience is understood as the ability of a system, or a part of it, to recover from a shock. In the field of the environment, resilience is a concept which was first mooted more than 40 years ago and coined by Holling (1973). From its original purpose in environmental studies, resilience has grown into a rather malleable, vague concept used in multiple disciplines. Although it is an important advantage for multidisciplinarity and communication between scientists, there is a need for the concept to be operative and practical (Brand and Jax 2007). This also applies to its application in urban research, where, as addressed in Chapter 3, there is neither a widely shared definition nor an operative approach to the notion of urban resilience.

To make the concept operative in decision-making, according to Brand and Jax (2007), the boundaries of the study need to be set by questioning the influential concept put forward by Carpenter et al. (2001) of “resilience of what/to what”. To that end, there is a need to understand the spatial and temporal dimensions in which the dynamics of the system occur not only at the specific scale of interest in each case but also at higher and lower scales. This leads to the concept of panarchy which provides a holistic approach to cross-scale interactions that might affect the development and trajectory of the SES under

18 _{Source: Debates in Plenary Sessions at the International Sustainability Transitions Conference, 29-30}

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study. Given the cross-scale environmental, social and economic interactions and inherent complexity of cities, understanding how higher and lower scales affect the resilience of urban systems is particularly important.

Equally important are the concepts of adaptive management, system thresholds and transformation, which establish how, when and why actors in the system may influence its resilience management when untenable situations persist, undesirable states are foreseen or the need to move towards a more beneficial or productive state is stimulated. These concepts are especially relevant in explaining sustainability transitions in a context where global environmental change poses a great challenge for humanity and the urgent need to transform our social and economic systems is increasingly being recognised by the scientific community and in the social and political arenas.

Adaptive management of SES includes governing two different processes (adapted from Nelson et al. 2007; see also Kates et al. 2012): (i) incremental adjustments; and (ii) transformative adaptation, which can be deliberate or non-deliberate. Specifically, in the field of climate change (Kates et al. 2012; Park et al. 2012) and in the quest for sustainable development (Westley et al. 2011), scientists increasingly argue that incremental adjustment are no longer sufficient and that a radical transformation is needed at both global and local scales. Thresholds (also known as tipping points) thus become cornerstones for (i) informing policy-making (Werners et al. 2013); (ii) comparing the performances of different systems (Carpenter 2013); and (iii) providing warning signals of critical transitions (Scheffer et al. 2009; Scheffer et al. 2012; Carpenter 2013). However, thresholds are not generic but context-dependant, and are usually unknown until they are crossed (Boettiger and Hastings 2013). This suggests that a specific analysis and an assessment of the focal system are needed to identify critical thresholds where a transformation would be required. Specifically, and given the importance of planet ecological thresholds in sustainable development, the significance of the understanding of the connections between human society and nature has been pointed out in this chapter as a crucial focus of resilience thinking. Maintaining ES is a source of resilience and for this to be possible, natural systems should be integrated into human decision-making processes. The question on how to integrate ES in decision making is address in Chapter 4 in the context of urban systems.

2 . T h e o r i e s o f r e s i l i e n c e a n d t r a n s f o r m a t i o n

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Knowledge acquisition through learning processes has been highlighted in this chapter as one of the key areas in adaptive management and therefore for resilience thinking, as knowledge and experience about how the system works and how it may react to certain stimuli translated into best management practices, is a source for resilience. Additionally, perceptions and beliefs of stakeholders involved in decision-making processes is a source of complexity and they may influence the direction of the system development, i.e. they may affect decisions to be made regarding alternative pathways of development. Both perspectives on how knowledge and experience influence resilience and transition management in the context of sustainable urban development will be addressed in the following chapters from a conceptual (Chapter 3) and empirical (Chapters 5, 6 and 7) point of view.

Together with resilience thinking and its concept of adaptive management applied to SES, this Chapter has also explored other theories such as TM focused on the study of transitions of STS, which help to understand how to govern processes of transformation. TM scholars have drawn up theories (Geels 2002) which include conceptualising how radical innovations that occur at micro-level can break into more stable states at meso and macro levels. This contributes to transformation theories based on resilience thinking by allowing technology, industry and the economy to take on more weight. It is recognised that sustainability and climate change challenges require an urgent transformation, and that transformation can be fed by both technological change and socio-institutional change, which includes changes in policy making and social behaviour (Kemp and van Lente 2011). The need to address policy and behavioural change has also been argued repeatedly in the urban context (see e.g. Weisz and Steinberger 2010), which further supports the need to bring together adaptive and transition management. The two areas of research have much in common and can provide fruitful insights into adapting urban needs to achieve more sustainable states.

The next chapter looks at how to translate this to the urban context and how to reveal the effective role of cities in sustainability transitions. Coupled human-ecological systems such as cities are complex (Holling 2001; Berkes et al. 2003; Liu et al. 2007b). As a result, modelling such systems and using the information obtained to govern and manage them is a complex undertaking. In this context, urban resilience management requires (i)

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the adaptive capacity to deal with uncertainty and surprises (Resilience Alliance 2007a); (ii) the ability to seize positive opportunities, including those for transformation, that change may bring about (Berkes and Folke 1998; Barnett 2001); and (iii) the ability to reduce vulnerability to such changes (Folke et al. 2002b; Folke et al. 2002a; Resilience Alliance 2007a). This reasoning suggests that if a city is to be resilient it would have to be an insatiable resource-consuming machine. This calls into question the need for resilience theory applied to the urban systems. However, resilience theory acknowledges that there may be undesirable resilient states (Carpenter et al. 2001) and that unintended transitions to those states should be avoided (Nelson et al. 2007)

One general message can be portrayed from this review: in order to effectively inform policy making, a forward-looking, multidisciplinary approach that brings together social, ecological, economic, institutional and technological dimensions is required. The theories of resilience and transformation can help to draw up such a new policy and governance framework mainly based on increasing cross-scale and multidisciplinary knowledge about the structure and functioning of systems.