Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer

This primer provides a framework for applying resilience thinking to watershed governance, emphasizing a shift from managing against change to managing for change. It identifies six core attributes for building resilient watersheds: inclusive participation, shared understanding, integration of ecosystem services, strong distributed leadership, institutional flexibility, and decentralized decision-making. The guide offers practical tools like the Social-Ecological Inventory (SEI) and social network analysis to help practitioners implement these attributes in real-world contexts, primarily within Canada.

• Inclusive participation in watershed governance builds resilience by creating trust, improving transparency, and enhancing the legitimacy of decision-making, which allows systems to self-organize and mobilize in response to disturbances.
• Meaningful inclusive participation requires building a shared understanding of the watershed's past, present, and future through deliberation, which allows diverse actors to respect different perspectives without necessarily reaching a total consensus.
• Strong leadership for watershed resilience is characterized by being distributed among a networked group, adaptable, efficient, transparent, accountable, and supportive of innovation and experimentation.
• Institutional and decision-making flexibility is essential to prevent management practices from becoming "locked in," allowing authorities to adapt to new information and unpredictable events, such as changing rainfall patterns.
• Decentralized systems enhance resilience by sharing decision-making authority across levels (national to local), which spreads risks and allows responses to be tailored to the most appropriate ecological scale.
• The document distinguishes between resilience and transformation, defining transformation as the creation of a fundamentally new system when existing social, economic, or ecological conditions make the current system untenable.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (n.d.). Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-2015-Primer-EnvironmentalSustainabilityResearchCentre-ResilienceInAWatershedGovernanceContextAPrimer-Krievins-et-al.pdf

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer. n.d. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-2015-Primer-EnvironmentalSustainabilityResearchCentre-ResilienceInAWatershedGovernanceContextAPrimer-Krievins-et-al.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer |url=https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-2015-Primer-EnvironmentalSustainabilityResearchCentre-ResilienceInAWatershedGovernanceContextAPrimer-Krievins-et-al.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitutendresilience, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, 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} }