A scoping review of how the seven principles for building social-ecological resilience have been operationalized

Just over ten years ago, resilience scholars proposed seven principles for enhancing the resilience of social-ecological systems. The authors argued that there was a pressing need for a better understanding of how the principles can be operationalized. Through a scoping review we evaluate how these principles have been operationalized, which we define as a process of moving a concept from the theoretical to the measurable using, in this case, resilience principles divided into component dimensions and identifying measurable indicator(s) for each dimension. Here we show that the seven resilience principles have been vastly underutilized as a tool for operationalizing social-ecological resilience. Of more than 750 articles citing the principles, just 23 operationalized them and only seven of these articles operationalized all seven principles. Several of those 23 articles were unclear in the ways in which operationalization occurred. In terms of geography, the focus of the majority of articles was in the Global North. Articles that operationalized the principles used a wide variety of dimensions and indicators. To advance the scholarship and practice of building social-ecological resilience, we recommend the use of a consistent set of dimensions, or “parts that make up the whole” for each resilience principle combined with contextualized indicators or measures. Following these recommendations will create the capacity for global analyses and insights while honoring the local context that creates unique conditions in each place. Further, using contextualized indicators allows for plural approaches to operationalizing social-ecological resilience.