144 Agroecology and Sustainability
developing desirable pathways for societal development in changing environments
where the future is unpredictable and surprise is likely (Gunderson and Holling,
2002; Adger et al, 2005).
Cross-scale and dynamic interactions
Social-ecological systems are linked across temporal and spatial scales and levels of
organization. Human capacities for abstraction and reflexivity, forward-looking
action, and technology development are strikingly different from ecological sys-
tems (Westley et al, 2002) and enable human systems to transcend constraints of
ecological scale. Local groups and communities are subject to decisions from
regional levels and connected to global markets and vice versa (Berkes et al, 2006).
A social-ecological system can avoid vulnerability at one timescale through the
technology it has adopted. Similarly, resilience at one spatial extent can be subsi-
dized from a broader scale, a common pattern in human cultural evolution (Red-
man, 1999; van der Leeuw, 2000) and exacerbated by technology, capital markets
and financial transfers that mask environmental feedback.
Such feedbacks and their cross-scale interactions in relation to resilience are in
the focus of a truly integrated social-ecological systems modelling of agents and
ecosystem with multiple stable states (e.g. Carpenter et al, 1999; Janssen and Car-
penter, 1999; Janssen et al, 2000; Carpenter and Brock, 2004; Bodin and Nor-
berg, 2005). Recent work suggests that complex systems ‘stutter’ or exhibit
increased variance at multiple scales in advance of a regime shift (Carpenter and
Brock, 2006). Such increases in variance help characterize regime shifts, and may
even allow early warning indicators of some regime shifts. Furthermore, multiple
thresholds and regime shifts at different scales and in different and interacting
ecological, economic and social domains are proposed to exist within regional
social-ecological systems (Kinzig et al, 2006).
New insights are emerging on cross-scale interactions in social-ecological systems
(Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Young, 2002; Cash et al, 2006) including dynamics
of social and economic drivers of land use change (Lambin et al, 2003) and on gov-
ernance systems that allow for learning and responding to environmental feedback
and change (Dietz et al, 2003). Good ecosystem management requires governance
and management approaches that can deal with the change and uncertainty inherent
in social-ecological systems and match social and ecological structures and processes
operating at different spatial and temporal scales (Folke et al, 1998b; Brown, 2003).
Adaptive Governance for Ecosystem Services
The capacity to adapt to and shape change is an important component of resil-
ience in social-ecological system (Berkes et al, 2003). In a social-ecological system
with high adaptability the actors have the capacity to reorganize the system within