Panarchy

Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.

The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has led to the term panarchy. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable. Such changes comprise economic, ecological, and social systems, and they are evolutionary. They concern rapidly unfolding processes and slowly changing ones; gradual change and episodic change; and they take place and interact at many scales from local to global.

Our take on panarchy is closely adapted from the Resilience Alliance.