Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer

The document outlines six attributes of resilience for watershed governance: inclusive participation, shared understanding, inclusion of ecosystem services, strong leadership, institutional flexibility, and decentralized systems. It emphasizes managing for change rather than against it, using tools like the Social-Ecological Inventory and historical profiling to build trust and adaptability in social-ecological systems.

• Resilience thinking in watershed governance is defined as the capacity of a social-ecological system to "persist, learn, change, and/or transform in response to a wide range of disturbances without compromising future adaptability."
• Inclusive participation builds resilience by creating trust, transparency, and legitimacy, which are necessary to "mobilize and self-organize in response to a wide range of disturbances". This involves integrating diverse knowledge sources, including scientific, local, and traditional ecological knowledge, and adopting approaches like "Two-Eyed Seeing" to integrate Western and Indigenous knowledges.
• Building a shared understanding involves a process of deliberation where actors listen to and respect different perspectives without necessarily reaching a total consensus. Practical techniques include developing a "historical profile" to understand drivers of change and "values and disturbances mapping" to identify spatial and conceptual threats to valued watershed assets.
• Integrating ecosystem services—categorized as supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services—into long-term planning is essential for holistic management. The document suggests that measuring the economic value of these services can lead to "more informed and effective environmental policy and management strategies."
• Strong leadership for resilience should be distributed among a networked group rather than centralized in one individual, and must be "adaptable", "efficient", "transparent and accountable", and "supportive of innovation and experimentation".
• Institutional flexibility is critical to avoid management becoming "locked in". The document cites the response to the Walkerton, Ontario drinking water tragedy as an example where the flexibility of Conservation Authorities allowed source water protection to become a mainstream priority.
• Decentralized systems enhance resilience by sharing decision-making across levels from national to local, which "spreads risks across time and space" and prevents a single point of failure from causing the whole system to fail.

APA

Krievins, K., Baird, J., Plummer, R., Brandes, O., Curry, A., Imhof, J., Mitchell, S., Moore, M.-L., & Swartling, Å. G. (2015). Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-2015-Primer-EnvironmentalSustainabilityResearchCentre-ResilienceInAWatershedGovernanceContextAPrimer-Krievins-et-al.pdf

Chicago

Krievins, Katrina, Julia Baird, Ryan Plummer, Oliver Brandes, Allen Curry, Jack Imhof, Simon Mitchell, Michele-Lee Moore, and Åsa Gerger Swartling. Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2015. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-2015-Primer-EnvironmentalSustainabilityResearchCentre-ResilienceInAWatershedGovernanceContextAPrimer-Krievins-et-al.pdf.

Wikipedia

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BibTeX

@techreport{krievins2015resilience, author = {Krievins, Katrina and Baird, Julia and Plummer, Ryan and Brandes, Oliver and Curry, Allen and Imhof, Jack and Mitchell, Simon and Moore, Michele-Lee and Swartling, Åsa Gerger}, title = {{Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2015}, month = oct, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-2015-Primer-EnvironmentalSustainabilityResearchCentre-ResilienceInAWatershedGovernanceContextAPrimer-Krievins-et-al.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }