Social and ecological resilience are not the same thing and they do not always overlap. However, they can overlap and reinforce each other, and create something we can call social- ecological resilience. We look at citizens' initiatives in The Netherlands, where people organize themselves to deal with environmental problems, or to figure out how to manage nature showing up unexpectedly, whether it is a wolf in the backyard, a beaver in the pond, or a weed in the pavement. We argue that governance needs to play a role, not to quash or predefine self- organizing citizens, nor to slot nature in a precise place, but to mediate, stabilize, structure and inform.
New paper, with Roel During and Rosalie van Dam, in Sustainability:
