Orientations to navigate the complexity of freshwater resilience in social-ecological systems

Xander Huggins , Vili Virkki, Elisabeth H. Krueger, Chelsea Kaandorp, Simon Fahrländer, Bhattaraphop Viriyaroj, Heindriken Dahlmann, Romi Amilia Lotcheris , Elina Paavonen, Petr Vesnovskii, David Lindao, Ronit Bohra, Lauren Seaby Andersen, Ingo Fetzer, Dieter Gerten, Fernando Jaramillo, Matti Kummu, Vajira Lasantha, Miina Porkka, Juan Carlos Rocha , Lan Wang-Erlandsson

Resilience is a widely applied and diversely interpreted concept in freshwater science with applications that span disciplines, analytical frameworks, scales of analysis, and system delineations. This diversity leads to an equally rich variety of resilience insights which are difficult to compare, aggregate, synthesize, and apply in decision-relevant contexts. Here, we seek to support greater critical and reflexive awareness of how freshwater resilience insights are generated by proposing three social-ecological orientations: 1) freshwater resilience as a shared physical and social reality; 2) the necessity of multiple knowledge production systems; 3) the emergence of freshwater resilience through open systems with cross-scale dynamics. We demonstrate the benefit of holding these orientations through four case studies spanning the almond debate of California's Central Valley, the Sahelian paradox, the seasonal flood pulse in the Mekong River Basin, and hydropower in the Amazon Basin. We envision that these orientations can serve as a shared foundation for holistic freshwater resilience research and better understanding of processes that generate resilience insights. To advance beyond perspectives of freshwater resilience that capture only one or few dimensions, we argue that freshwater resilience science should embrace a sustained commitment to inclusion of multiple perspectives, provision of context-rich descriptions of resilience processes, and transparency in documenting how resilience is conceptualised in the research that produces claims about it.