Social-ecological systems theoretical framework review

The conflicts between human beings and natural environment have become a global issue and humans understandings on the living environment have been pushed onto a new step. In recent years, social-ecological systems as research objective have been a noble perspective for sustainable development and global changes exploring. The Resilience Alliance (RA) is an international research team concentrating on the interdisciplinary field that explores the dynamics of social-ecological systems and formulates relatively complete theoretical system. The body of knowledge developed by the organization is comprised of a series of key concepts of adaptive cycles, panarchy, resilience, transformability and adaptability and provides a foundation for sustainable development theory and practice. Some ideas and concepts about social-ecological systems conceptual framework developed by the Resilience Alliance are introduced in this paper. Social-ecological system is a complex adaptive system that is unpredictable, self-organization, nonlinear, diversity and multiple regimes, and can be described in terms of a cycle, named adaptive cycle that is a heuristic model and can usefully describe the dynamics mechanism of social-ecological systems. Resilience, adaptability and transformation are social-ecological systems of three attributes. Panarchy is an expression of hierarchy as a nested set of adaptive cycles. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.