Courtesy of the wonderful Communications and Marketing people at Stockholm Resilience Centre, the soon-to-be released book by the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars group, Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems with Cambridge University Press, has a 20 page brochure that provides a wonderful short course on resilience available in hard copy or free online at: http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/4-22-2014-applying-resilience-thinking.html
The pamphlet highlights the content of the forthcoming book and provides examples that put the theory into practice. The book identifies seven principles that are considered crucial for building resilience in social-ecological systems and discusses how these principles can be practically applied. The seven principles are 1) maintain diversity and redundancy, 2) manage connectivity, 3) manage slow variables and feedbacks, 4) foster complex adaptive systems thinking, 5) encourage learning, 6) broaden participation, and 7) promote polycentric governance systems.
Each chapter of the book introduces and defines one of the principles and then proceeds to detail how the principle enhances resilience and the context in which resilience may be compromised. Importantly, the book chapters go beyond theory to identify how the principles can be operationalized and applied (the application of resilience thinking to real-world situations). Further the chapters identify gaps in both research and application. While the chapters are chock full of examples, they also contain longer case studies that draw out the nuances of the chapter.
The hope is that the wonderfully informative brochure will generate enough interest to warrant the purchase of the book. The book is written in a manner conducive for both experienced resilience scholars looking for a compendium of research findings as well as grad students and scholars new to the field and looking for a guide. In effect, it is the book that the editors and authors wished was available for them as they started learning the concepts.
michaelschoon 