Resilience thinking has frequently been proposed as an alternative to conventional natural resource management, but there are few studies of its applications in real-world settings. To address this gap, we synthesized experiences from practitioners that have applied a resilience thinking approach to strategic planning, called Resilience Planning, in regional natural resource management organizations in Australia. This case represents one of the most extensive and long-term applications of resilience thinking in the world today. We conducted semi-structured interviews with Resilience Planning practitioners from nine organizations and reviewed strategic planning documents to investigate: 1) the key contributions of the approach to their existing strategic planning, and 2) what enabled and hindered the practitioners in applying and embedding the new approach in their organizations. Our results reveal that Resilience Planning contributed to developing a social-ecological systems perspective, more adaptive and collaborative approaches to planning, and that it clarified management goals of desirable resource conditions. Applying Resilience Planning required translating resilience thinking to practice in each unique circumstance, while simultaneously creating support among staff, and engaging external actors. Embedding Resilience Planning within organizations implied starting and maintaining longer-term change processes that required sustained multi-level organizational support. We conclude by identifying four lessons for successfully applying and embedding resilience practice in an organization: 1) to connect internal entrepreneurs to interpreters and networkers who work across organizations, 2) to assess the opportunity context for resilience practice, 3) to ensure that resilience practice is a learning process that engages internal and external actors, and 4) to develop reflective strategies for managing complexity and uncertainty.

This study investigates how cases of social-ecological resilience practice are engaging with complexity across a diversity of contexts and approaches. Compared to some other resilience frameworks, social-ecological resilience thinking explicitly includes the perspective of complex adaptive systems. However, there is still a lack of knowledge of what this perspective means in practice when it comes to interventions aimed at assessing or building resilience, and there is a demand for practical guidance on how to address complexity. With a growing experience of resilience practice from different parts of the world there is now an opportunity to synthesize lessons across cases. In this study, we assessed twelve cases for how they engaged with complexity, according to a framework of six features of complex adaptive systems. The cases are situated in a diversity of contexts, such as rural villages in Tajikistan, a Swedish municipality, Australian catchment management authorities, a Canadian coastal fishery, and the Arctic council. We organized the cases of resilience practice into three types of approaches: 1) Assessment of theory-based resilience frameworks, 2) Participatory resilience assessment, and 3) Resilience-based planning and operations. Our results reveal alternative key strategies for engaging with complexity in each of these approaches, as well as different key tools and novel situated practices among the cases. The results can help practitioners to orientate their resilience practice, address multiple aspects of complexity, and prioritize strategies depending on their context, purpose, and type of approach. We also highlight two areas of advancing resilience practice methods and approaches: narratives for articulating and guiding desirable change, and an international and transdisciplinary community of practice.

The concept of resilience is currently being widely promoted and applied by environmental and development organizations. However, their application of resilience often lacks theoretical backing and evaluation. This paper presents a novel cross-fertilization of two commonly used approaches for applying resilience thinking: the grassroots movement of Transition Towns and the Resilience Alliance's Resilience Assessment. We compared these approaches through a text analysis of their key handbooks and combined them in a series of participatory workshops with a local partner active in the Transition Movement. Our results demonstrate that despite sharing a number of key features, these two approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Strengths of the Transition Movement include its motivating overarching narrative of the need to transform in response to global sustainability challenges, as well as practical tools promoting learning and participation. The Resilience Assessment's conceptual framework and structured process generated context-specific understanding of resilience, but provided little guidance on navigating transformation processes. Combining the Resilience Assessment's theory on complex systems with the Transition Movement's methods for learning also generated synergies in fostering complexity thinking. Based on these findings, we believe that integrating strengths from both approaches could be widely useful for practitioners seeking to apply resilience for sustainable development. Our study also highlights that methods for assessing resilience can be improved by combining insights from science and practice.

Globally, food systems face multifaceted sustainability challenges and the need for substantial food system change or transformation is increasingly acknowledged. Such transformations will look different across the world due to diverse regional social-ecological contexts. We explored and articulated what a transformed food system could look like in a specific regional context – the Stockholm-Mälaren region in Sweden, based on the perspectives of a diverse set of regional actors. The approach we used is based on a novel methodology for bottom-up, participatory narrative scenarios that has been developed in the international sustainability science project “Bright Spots: Seeds of the Good Anthropocene”. Through a participatory workshop and a survey, we explored a vision of a positive food future for the Stockholm-Mälaren region and potential conflicts and opportunities for moving towards that future. The emerging vision highlights four components that represent a significant change from the current situation: 1) Increased self-sufficiency and access to local food, 2) A vibrant and inclusive food sector and culture, 3) Nutrient-rich, less resource-intensive diets, and 4) Agriculture contributing to environmental sustainability. The study highlights conflicts between different goals of a sustainable and resilient food system, such as food security, self-sufficiency and resource efficiency, that need to be clarified and managed. We also identify opportunities for creating transformative change in the Stockholm-Mälaren food system, including: the leverage of key actors in between producers and consumers, agreement on a broader vision among the participating food actors, a potential to link to national-scale narratives of food security and sustainable consumption and incorporate change at the scale of local governments.