Spatial Resilience in Case Studies of SESs

Abstract

One of the ultimate tests of the value of ideas about spatial resilience is whether or not they can be applied usefully to understanding and interpreting real-world case studies. In the introduction to this book I made the claim that the widespread ten- dency amongst empirical complex systems researchers to disregard spatial aspects of resilience, or at least to leave them out of core analyses and models, is one of the reasons why case studies of resilience in qualitatively different systems have yielded so few of the generalities that give science its predictive power. The preceding chapters have presented numerous specific examples of how spa- tial relationships to other social-ecological systems can be important and howspatial influences (such as rescue effects, transfers of information through networks, and cross-scale subsidies) may explain some of the dynamics that can confound com- parative analyses of resilience in social-ecological system resilience. What this synthesis still lacks, however, is clarification of how the framework presented in Chapter 3 and the ideas and methods in Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 can be applied to and enriched by real-world case studies.