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In an increasingly complex, rapidly changing world, the capacity to cope with, adapt to, and shape change is vital. This thesis investigates how natural resource management can be organized and practiced to nurture this capacity, referred to as resilience, in social-ecological systems. Based on case studies and large-N data sets from UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) and the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), it analyzes actors and social processes involved in adaptive co-management on the ground. Papers I & II use Kristianstads Vattenrike BR to analyze the roles of local stewards and bridging organizations. Here, local stewards, e.g. farmers and bird watchers, provide on-site management, detailed, long-term monitoring, and local ecological knowledge, build public support for ecosystem management, and hold unique links to specialized networks. A bridging organization strengthens their initiatives. Building and drawing on multi-level networks, it gathers different types of ecological knowledge, builds moral, political, legal and financial support from institutions and organizations, and identifies windows of opportunity for projects. Paper III synthesizes the MA community-based assessments and points to the importance of bridging organizations, leadership and vision, knowledge networks, institutions nested across scales, enabling policies, and high motivation among actors for adaptive co-management. Paper IV explores learning processes catalyzed by bridging organizations in BRs. 79 of the 148 BRs analyzed bridge local and scientific knowledge in efforts to conserve biodiversity and foster sustainable development, provide learning platforms, support knowledge generation (research, monitoring and experimentation), and frame information and education to target groups. Paper V tests the effects of participation and adaptive co-management in BRs. Local participation is positively linked to local support, successful integration of conservation and development, and effectiveness in achieving developmental goals. Participation of scientists is linked to effectiveness in achieving 'conventional' conservation goals and policy-makers enhance the integration of conservation and development. Adaptive co-management, found in 46 BRs, is positively linked to self-evaluated effectiveness in achieving developmental goals, but not at the expense of conservation. The thesis concludes that adaptive collaboration and learning processes can nurture resilience in social-ecological systems. Such processes often need to be catalyzed, supported and protected to survive. Therefore, bridging organizations are crucial in adaptive co-management.

'Success' is a vigorously debated concept in conservation. There is a drive to develop quantitative, comparable metrics of success to improve conservation interventions. Yet the qualitative, normative choices inherent in decisions about what to measure — emerging from fundamental philosophical commitments about what conservation is and should be — have received scant attention. We address this gap by exploring perceptions of what constitutes a successful biodiversity corridor in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa, an area of global biodiversity significance. Biodiversity corridors are particularly illustrative because, as interventions intended to extend conservation practices from protected areas across broader landscapes, they represent prisms in which ideas of conservation success are contested and transformed. We use Q method to elicit framings of success among 20 conservation scientists, practitioners and community representatives, and find three statistically significant framings of successful corridors: 'a last line of defence for biodiversity under threat,' 'a creative process to develop integrative, inclusive visions of biodiversity and human wellbeing,' and 'a stimulus for place-based cultural identity and economic development.' Our results demonstrate that distinct understandings of what a corridor is — a planning tool, a process of governing, a territorialized place — produce divergent framings of 'successful' corridors that embody diverse, inherently contestable visions of conservation. These framings emerge from global conservation discourses and distinctly local ecologies, politics, cultures and histories. We conclude that visions of conservation success will be inherently plural, and that in inevitably contested and diverse social contexts success on any terms rests upon recognition of and negotiation with alternative visions.

PurposeThis article seeks to broaden how researchers in supply chain management view supply chain resilience by drawing on and integrating insights from other disciplines – in particular, the literature on the resilience of social-ecological systems.Design/methodology/approachBefore the authors import new notions of resilience from outside the discipline, the current state of the art in supply chain resilience research is first briefly reviewed and summarized. Drawing on five practical examples of disruptive events and challenges to supply chain practice, the authors assess how these examples expose gaps in the current theoretical lenses. These examples are used to motivate and justify the need to expand our theoretical frameworks by drawing on insights from the literature on social-ecological systems.FindingsThe supply chain resilience literature has predominantly focused on minimizing the consequences of a disruption and on returning to some form of steady state (often assumed to be identical to the state that existed prior to the disruption) implicitly assuming the supply chain behaves like an engineered system. This article broadens the debate around supply chain resilience using literature on social-ecological systems that puts forward three manifestations of resilience: (1) persistence, which is akin to an engineering-based view, (2) adaptation and (3) transformation. Furthermore, it introduces seven principles of resilience thinking that can be readily applied to supply chains.Research limitations/implicationsA social-ecological interpretation of supply chains presents many new avenues of research, which may rely on the use of innovative research methods to further our understanding of supply chain resilience.Practical implicationsThe article encourages managers to think differently about supply chains and to consider what this means for their resilience. The three manifestations of resilience are not mutually exclusive. For example, while persistence may be needed in the initial aftermath of a disruption, adaptation and transformation may be required in the longer term.Originality/valueThe article challenges traditional assumptions about supply chains behaving like engineered systems and puts forward an alternative perspective of supply chains as being dynamic and complex social-ecological systems that are impossible to entirely control.