Beyond social vulnerability analysis: accounting for social-ecological resilience in coastal governance

Background/Question/Methods

Social vulnerability analysis (SVA) has been widely used for informing coastal management and governance. However, SVA methodologies have limited capacity for developing policies and decision-making as it has fundamental limitations for application to social-ecogical systems (SES). In order to overcome the limitations of SVA, we examined how social vulnerability was framed in a coastal context. This work relied on critical discourse analysis and key informant interviews to understand different framings of social vulnerability in coastal governance and management, globally and in New Zealand.

Results/Conclusions

We found that framing of social vulnerability in coastal governance is mainly influenced by engineering, community and disaster resilience, focusing on return and recovery governance responses to environmental change (e.g., hurricanes, wildfires). This perspective does not account for the dynamism and non-stationarity of social-ecological systems, which is increasingly important in the face of accelerating environmental change. Thus, we suggest a novel perspective based on social-ecological resilience, which more accurately reflects the dynamics of linked systems of humans and nature (SES). Incorporating social-ecological resilience into SVA can improve coastal governance by accounting for adaptation and transformation, as well as scale and cross-scale interactions.