water Article Social Ecological Dynamics of Catchment Resilience W. Neil Adger , Katrina Brown * , Catherine Butler and Tara Quinn   Citation: Adger, W.N.; Brown, K.; Butler, C.; Quinn, T. Social Ecological Dynamics of Catchment Resilience. Water 2021, 13, 349. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/w13030349 Academic Editors: Robert L. Wilby, Harriet Orr and Nigel Watson Received: 16 December 2020 Accepted: 26 January 2021 Published: 30 January 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Geography, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK; n.adger@exeter.ac.uk (W.N.A.); c.butler@exeter.ac.uk (C.B.); t.quinn@exeter.ac.uk (T.Q.) * Correspondence: katrina.brown@exeter.ac.uk Abstract: Catchment resilience is the capacity of a combined social ecological system, comprised of water, land, ecological resources and communities in a river basin, to deal with sudden shocks and gradual changes, and to adapt and self-organize for progressive change and transform itself for sustainability. This paper proposes that analysis of catchments as social ecological systems can provide key insights into how social and ecological dynamics interact and how some of the negative consequences of unsustainable resource use or environmental degradation can be ameliorated. This requires recognition of the potential for community resilience as a core element of catchment resilience, and moves beyond more structural approaches to emphasize social dynamics. The proposals are based on a review of social ecological systems research, on methods for analyzing community resilience, and a review of social science and action research that suggest ways of generating resilience through community engagement. These methods and approaches maximize insights into the social dynamics of catchments as complex adaptive systems to inform science and practice. Keywords: community resilience; social ecological systems; institutional fit; governance; social pro- cesses 1. Introduction Catchment resilience is the dynamic capacity of interacting social and ecological elements of an area bounded by a river basin to cope with disruptions and shocks, and to adapt to and change in new circumstances. The extent of catchment resilience and the processes through which it is generated have been extensively researched, giving the concept meaning and making it observable and measurable. Social analysis of catchment resilience emphasizes process and action, rather than assets or competences, and the metrics to assess catchment resilience are diverse. However, catchment resilience is not only empirically observed, it is also a normative concept – a goal to be desired and enacted, assuming that resilience is universally and always a desirable trait of a system. This paper conceptualizes catchment resilience as a characteristic of a complex dy- namic social ecological system. We review insights from studies and research that examine catchments as social ecological systems; they characterize catchments as involving inter- actions between human society and the environment. This view emphasizes how rivers, land use, settlements, hazards and institutions interact to produce systems in stable and less stable states. While the original objective of social ecological systems analysis was descriptive, subsequent work aimed to present a more analytical framework, which could also be used for comparative analysis. Anderies, Janssen, and Ostrom [1], for example, developed a simple model to analyze the robustness of social ecological systems which aims to identify the key interactions within systems, recognizing both the designed and self-organized components of a social ecological system and how they interact. Ostrom [2] sets out a generic framework that can be applied and refined by scholars to clarify the structure of a social ecological system to understand how any particular solution might affect management outcomes and sustainability, applied to diverse governance systems and contexts. Water 2021, 13, 349. https://doi.org/10.3390/w13030349 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/water