Governing social-ecological systems to achieve sustainable and equitable outcomes remains a key challenge. When these conditions are not met and modest interventions in management prove insufficient, transformation may be needed to shift the system into a more desirable regime. Facilitating such shifts in a purposeful way involves a degree of risk that can be ameliorated by understanding social-ecological system dynamics, including key links among social and ecological variables, and their interactions across scales. Resilience assessment is one approach to understanding resource issues in an integrated systems context. However, with its emphasis on building resilience of the existing system, what is the role for resilience assessment in enabling transformation? Recent advances in assessment methodologies and novel empirical approaches suggest that resilience assessment could play an important role in transformation processes by revealing specific opportunities and barriers. Drawing on a case study of Pacific herring fisheries in Canada, I explore the relationship between resilience assessment and transformation. In this coupled human-ocean system we assessed changes in social and ecological dimensions of resilience, using 22 system-specific metrics, through 3 governance eras punctuated by crises.
Results/Conclusions
We found a significant erosion of system-wide resilience over time, with the greatest decline between pre-colonial and colonial eras. All aspects of system diversity that we measured declined through time, while other metrics showed some recent signs of recovery. Quantifying the erosion of resilience in Canada’s Pacific herring fishery revealed specific opportunities for change in fisheries governance, including knowledge of past governance practices, as well as some of the social and ecological barriers that remain. Within the current window of opportunity, insights from the resilience assessment could inform and enable transformation processes.