Applied Panarchy

Flint, Michigan, was struggling after many years of economic decline. The city faced persistent problems with contaminated drinking water, poor nutrition, and uneven access to food. A community-based research effort proposed a resilience assessment built on panarchy theory, aimed at guiding the city toward a food system that could be sustained over time. Flint is one of many cases showing how the theory is used to understand and shape change in systems where people and nature are closely linked.

This volume follows Panarchy, the 2002 work by Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling, and surveys how interdisciplinary scholarship and practical applications of panarchy ideas have developed over the past two decades. The theory now reaches fields as different as economics, law, and urban planning, and has changed how environmental stewardship is carried out in concrete ways.

The central idea is that systems, including forests, power grids, farms, coastal storm surges, public health networks, economies, and systems of government, are nested inside larger systems and affect them in ways that are hard to predict. People want stability and resilience, but natural systems never remain fixed. The question is how societies can anticipate these shifts and adapt to them. The earlier book set out a framework for understanding the cycles of transformation and for influencing them. This book shows how those concepts have been modified and refined, how they connect with other disciplines, and how they bear on the management of natural resources.

Written as a text for graduate courses in environmental sciences and related fields, the book is meant to encourage a new generation of scholars, researchers, and professionals to put these ideas into practice.