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# Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems

## Details

**Authors** Walker, Brian and Holling, C. S. and Carpenter, Stephen R. and Kinzig, Ann P.

**Year** 2004

**Publisher** Ecology and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, art. 5

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Ecology

**Secondary disciplines** Environment & Sustainability

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.5751/es-00650-090205) 
10.5751/es-00650-090205

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To argue that resilience, adaptability, and transformability together determine how social-ecological systems develop.

### How they did it (methods)

Conceptual synthesis using stability landscapes and examples, including a shift from cattle ranching to wildlife conservancies in southeastern Zimbabwe.

### What they found (results)

Resilience has four components: latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy (cross-scale influences). Basins of attraction and their thresholds determine whether a system stays in a desirable state. Adaptability can be exercised by moving thresholds, moving the system relative to them, changing how hard they are to cross, and managing cross-scale interactions. Transformability involves creating new stability landscapes with new state variables. Resilience loss is better contained at smaller scales.

## Commentary

### In short

The authors describe how social-ecological systems absorb disturbance, adjust, or change fundamentally, using thresholds between states and influences across scales.

### Response

Thresholds between basins of attraction are distinctions between states; the nesting of scales and cross-scale influence is part-whole structure; and the interactions among scales are relationships. The paper is conceptual, offers no test of the structures, and perspectives are not a central element, so the fit is partial.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R

**Added** 2026-10-28

**How to cite this** Walker, Brian and Holling, C. S. and Carpenter, Stephen R. and Kinzig, Ann P. (2004). Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems. Ecology and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, art. 5.