Incorporating Resilience into the Analysis of Sustainable Socioeconomic Development

Abstract

Efforts to create unambiguous measures of sustainable development without compromising the complexity of the concept are continuously frustrated by technical limitations. Determining and quantifying the relationships between socioeconomic and environmental domains is complicated by the need to account for interactions between varied spatial and temporal scales. The resilience perspective has been used as a conceptual framework for unifying these concerns. Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (2007) explicitly links sustainable development (spatial scale) and global climate change (temporal scale), and discusses both in terms of resilience. However, conceptual imprecision within the resilience literature persists. This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological complexity of sustainable development; clarifies imprecision that persists within the resilience literature; establishes a conceptual framework for the analysis of socioeconomic development in light of likely impacts of global climate change; and identifies research priorities for the identification and interpretation of sustainable development indicators.