Journal of Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development (RESD) Volume 2, Issue 2, December 2016 - ISSN 2356-8569 http://dx.doi.org/10.21622/RESD.2016.02.2.070 70 Sustainable Development and Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS): Resilience as a Guiding Principle in the Urban-Industrial Nexus Klaus Krumme Centre for Logistics & Traffic (ZLV), University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), Duisburg, Germany klaus.krumme@uni-due.de Abstract - This conceptual paper focuses on the connection between system resilience and sustainable development. Setting an inclusive frame and beginning with stating the nature of complexity related to the sustainability challenge and the resultant uncertainty of planning and management within socio-economic domains, the article describes the demand for a system approach and emphasizes the importance of a resilience-oriented approach to sustainable development, including the provision of correlated conceptual frameworks, as opposed to an efficiency paradigm. The first part of the article mirrors on a systematic collection, assessment and reflection of scientific contributions alongside sustainable development/ sustainability strategies, resilience thinking and especially combinations of both with system theory/ nested systems theory, using a qualitative integrative research review method. Sources principally consider progressive explicitly interdisciplinary directions of the scientific community, evolved through the recent decades as sustainability sciences. The scientific state of knowledge is contextualized with sub- chapters of introduction, problem statement, and demand profile for problem solutions as well as system resilience as point of reference. The central focus of the second part is on urban and industrial spheres of un-sustainability as well as their functional inter-connectedness as a main potential driver for progress in sustainable development. Elements of rooting sustainable development in a stronger consideration of an urban-industrial nexus proposed here are suggested for a consideration of resilience to describe more appropriate system constitutions and intra-connections as well as better system boundaries for assessments and innovative solutions. For the guiding of a more inclusive view of system agents inside the urban-industrial nexus, expansion of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) towards Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) as guiding resilience based framework is proposed. The urban-industrial nexus and SETS are considered as a basis for new research directions of sustainability sciences. Keywords - Sustainable Development, Sustainability Challenge, System Thinking, Resilience, Systems Integration, Urban-Industrial Nexus, Social-Ecological Systems (SES), Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS), Sustainability Science. I. INTRODUCTION As an epochal contribution to the future of the world, the international community recently adopted their SDGs, the “Sustainable Development Goals” (Sachs 2015, United Nations 2015). To produce practical and measurable progress towards sustainability, 17 goals have been identified as SDGs covering all critical ecological, social and economical issues corresponding to sustainable development and a number of grand global challenges. Although they differ in an improved level of concreteness, the SDGs stand in the tradition of the former Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Rio Process (Sachs 2012). The aim is to meet concrete objectives –which is of ultimate importance- while at the same time base progress on a safe operating space for humanity, respecting the planetary boundaries (Folke and Rockström 2009, Rockström, Steffen et al. 2009, Rockstrom and Klum 2015, Steffen, Richardson et al. 2015). The concept of sustainability and the practice oriented directions towards sustainable development have been discussed widely in the academic and non- academic world from many perspectives, producing different and also partly contradictory baseline understandings (Brundtland, Khalid et al. 1987, Costanza and Patten 1995, Elkington 1997), up to sophisticated scientific discourses about the inner meaning of constitutional frameworks and theories