OUR RESEARCH AGENDA - Envisioning Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems  
  
Guiding Questions:  
* How does resilience manifest itself in different systems?  
* What are the properties of systems that make them more or less resilient?  
* What are the attributes of SESs that cause them to gain or lose resilience and adaptive capacity?  
* How do we measure resilience?  
* How do we recover resilience and adaptability in systems where they are being eroded, and enhance them in systems undergoing change?  
* What are the relationships between resilience, adaptability and transformability? 
            

We are in the process of establishing a new program of research, building on the work over the past few years.  Some existing work will continue, in the form of on-going 
research by members in a number of regional SESs.  The kinds of resource-use systems include:  
  
Lakes used for fishing and/or recreation  
Marine systems  
Semi-arid rangelands used for livestock production  
Irrigated agricultural systems  
Forest regions involving conservation, harvesting and/or conversion to agriculture  
Subsistence agriculture based on mixed systems of livestock and cultivation  
Urban systems  
Ancient and historical systems - A deep time analysis of resilience  
For the past three years the RA has been involved in a series of comparisons of some 15 case studies in such regional SES, involving two workshops in which the 
regions were compared in terms of their resilience.  The results of this work will appear in 2005 as a special edition of the journal Ecology and Society. 
            

Communications has the task of developing a communications program, building on and extending the existing development and use of the RA Portal.  
Education  A primary activity will be the initiation of an open source RA library of resilience analysis and teaching tools.    
The RA Workbooks   
Resilience Alliance Portal   
Ecology and Society journal  (http://www.ecologyandsociety.org) 
            

The next phase of RA research will consist of two main streams - I. a set of four main research projects, and, II. an associated cross-cutting program of theory 
development. 
I. Regional Research Themes  
1. Water, agriculture, land-use and resilience 
2. Resilience and long-term human well-being in regions with reserves  
3. The resilience of marine systems 
4. Urban resilience  
 
II. Cross-Cutting Theory Development  
1.  A new theory program is under development (led by Steve Carpenter, Carl Folke and others).  The thrust is to gain a better understanding of transformations 
in SESs that have been subject to great disturbance, or that for some other reason are changing radically.  The backloop is the most mysterious and unpredictable 
phase of change in complex systems, yet also the phase where the most exciting, influential and novel events happen.  Briefly, the program will have five interlocking 
elements, each involving several RA researchers and nodes. 
2. An on-going project on thresholds and regime shifts. It began as a joint initiative with the Santa Fe Institute's 'Robustness' project with an evolving 
database of threshold examples, available on the RA website. The aim is to develop a typology of thresholds in ecosystems and social-ecological systems. The 
database will shortly be of sufficient size to warrant initial analyses aimed at a typology of thresholds and regime shifts.  
 Integration of I. and II. 
Analyses of resilience, adaptability and transformability in SESs for the development of guidelines and principles for interventions in regard to (i) 
governance (including institutions and policy), (ii) investment, and (iii) management, aimed at enhancing long-term net social benefit.A variety of methods 
and approaches are being used to tackle this research agenda.