This working group explores transformative change towards an expansion of agroecology and eventually more multifunctional, diverse, biocultural landscapes. We want to understand how ever-changing relations between people, biodiversity and food create landscapes and food systems with the help of knowledge co-production and co-creation with food system actors and communities. We study diverse geographical contexts, and we bring an explicit gender and intersectional lens to our work. The group aims to provide insights into agroecology as 1) practice by looking into how transformative change processes take place in food systems with the help of best-practice examples, 2) movement with what roles values, knowledge, and equity play, and 3) science by critically reflecting on the role of science and taking a reflexive and activist approach.

This working group focuses on advancing the resilience of rangelands in social-ecological systems (SES) by synthesising insights from diverse case studies. Rangelands are vital ecosystems supporting livelihoods, biodiversity, and agricultural production, yet they remain understudied compared to other landscapes. The group will explore key resilience drivers, adaptive strategies, and governance structures across different regions to develop transferable lessons for sustainable rangeland management.

Social-Ecological System Health (SESH) is an approach intersecting the social-ecological system approach and integrated approaches to health (IAH) including One Health (OH), planetary health and Ecohealth. The OH approach has been redefined recently as a systemic, intersectoral and transdisciplinary approach aiming at “Healthy ecosystems with healthy people and animals”. To deliver this ambitious objective, IAH have two great challenges to address. The first one is operational but require deep scientific inputs: IAH initiatives need to move beyond institutionalisation at international and national level towards a methodology that connect top-down ambitions with demand-driven bottom-up operationalisation of the approach. In other word, how do we ground IAH into SES? The second challenge is more thematic: how to better integrate dimensions of environmental/ecosystem health into IAH, from territories to planet boundaries? The SES Health working group will explore these applied research questions which constitute a frontier in SES research and will try to link as much as possible with similar pr related groups of thinking.

This working group brings together researchers across disciplines to develop a shared understanding of how forest SES adapt and transform under global change. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and shifting societal demands are forcing forest systems into novel conditions and trajectories that challenge established management paradigms and practices. While forestry has a strong tradition of long‑term and adaptive management, we posit that it can greatly benefit through deeper integration with broader SES and resilience scholarship. By facilitating exchange across disciplines, we develop shared concepts and methods for studying forests as systems in which ecological processes and human practices, values, and governance co‑evolve. The working group aims to build an international network of researchers linking forestry and SES science, foster collaboration, and facilitate synthesis research on forest adaptation pathways across diverse ecological and social contexts.

This working group explores Nature-Based Transformation (NBT) as a strategy to address global challenges, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, by fostering sustainable human-nature interactions. While NBT is recognized as essential for sustainability, research has been largely localized, lacking a structured, evidence-based understanding of how to scale successful initiatives across regions and institutions.

The group aims to analyze NBT processes – including governance, decision-making, and social learning – and assess their outcomes on biodiversity, ecosystem services, and adaptation. It will also examine the social-ecological networks driving transformative change and identify global NBT archetypes to support scaling strategies. Additionally, the working group seeks to bridge the knowledge-action gap through Living Labs, fostering collaboration between researchers and practitioners. By linking theory with practice, this effort will provide pathways to expand and sustain NBT initiatives, ensuring inclusive, evidence-based approaches that contribute to global sustainability transformations.

This working group explores the transformation of our embedded economic system to follow the principles of natural systems. Starting from the principle that economies are embedded within society and the biosphere, the group examines how prevailing economic models contribute to ecological degradation, social inequity, and growing systemic instability often described as “polycrisis”.

The polycrisis is a consequence of a fundamentally flawed relationship between economic activity and the natural environment. Economic systems exist within a biophysically constrained planet, yet prevailing models and activities continue to ignore environmental limits. Research demonstrates ongoing overshoot of planetary boundaries alongside the erosion of social cohesion, ecological integrity and long-term system resilience. These dynamics point to the need for systemic change rather than incremental adjustment.

This WG brings together perspectives from wellbeing and post-growth economics, resilience theory, regenerative and living-systems approaches, and Indigenous and place-based knowledge systems. We examine how economic paradigms shape relationships between people, nature, and institutions, and how alternative forms of economic organisation, governance and provisioning strengthen adaptive capacity, resilience and long-term system health. We address key cross-cutting issues, including biodiversity and finance, the feasibility of nature-positive economies under a growth-based economic imperative, and the foundational systems that support the economy and human well-being, such as food and agriculture.

This working group focuses on developing and applying indicators to advance ocean equity in marine conservation and sustainability. Building on findings from the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment (TCA), the group collaborates with scientists, the WWF, and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) to ensure inclusive, just, and effective governance of marine biodiversity.

Recognizing the inequitable distribution of ocean resources, benefits, and harms, the group aims to institutionalize ocean equity through research, workshops, and place-based studies. It will analyze initiatives with transformative potential, ensuring that equity assessments inform corrective actions in governance and policy. Since no single framework fits all contexts, the working group will develop adaptable assessment approaches to address diverse social and ecological settings. By synthesizing existing knowledge and engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations, the group seeks to drive sustainability transformations that support both human well-being and ocean health, creating actionable pathways for more equitable marine governance.

This working group explores urban resilience through a Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) lens to address sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequities. By integrating insights from social and natural sciences, engineering, and futures thinking, the group examines the drivers of urban transformation and governance processes that enable or hinder resilience.

The group will conduct conceptual syntheses, comparative case studies, and participatory research to understand how resilience is enacted in diverse urban contexts. Key objectives include advancing theoretical and empirical insights on urban resilience, developing futures-oriented approaches for scenario planning, and fostering transdisciplinary dialogue to bridge research, policy, and practice.

By refining frameworks for urban transformation and engaging with communities, the working group aims to equip cities with adaptive and transformative pathways toward sustainability. This initiative builds on prior research from PECS and the Resilience Alliance, contributing to a new generation of urban resilience scholarship and practice.

Our working group is united by two propositions. First, humans are not detached observers of their environments; rather, they enact their worlds through continuous, embodied engagement with socio-material surroundings. Second, society emerges through processes of participatory sense-making and it is these patterned forms of interpretation, coordination, and response that drive social-ecological stability and change.

Building on these foundations, the group seeks to leverage conceptual and practical understanding of human embodiment, enactivism, and embeddedness to explain what works in sustainability practice, why these approaches are effective, and how they can foster more relational, just, and transformative outcomes. Through this work, we aim to develop frameworks, methods, and design principles that both strengthen existing approaches and open new directions for SES scholarship and practice.

This woking group explores Nature Connectedness (NC) as a leverage point for transformative change in social-ecological systems (SES). While international research shows that strong NC can support pro-nature behaviours, wellbeing, and systemic change, its relevance and application in this region remains underexplored. This working group focuses on understanding diverse human–nature relationships, testing how NC benefits translate in different local contexts, and identifying practical, context-sensitive ways to integrate NC into education, health, and governance.

To support this, the group is building a reflexive, caring community of practice through monthly reflection sessions, knowledge exchanges, conference dialogues, and creative engagement tools – including a transdisciplinary toolkit, an NC archetype quiz, and interactive games. They are also developing training resources, podcasts, policy briefs, and blogs to share stories from the field and support early-career researchers. By connecting research, policy, and practice, the group aims to reframe how NC is understood and applied, and to cultivate a more grounded, inclusive, and transformative approach to sustainability.

More information on this thematic working group soon!

The main focus is to operationalise relational paradigms in the practice of sustainability transformations. While diverse, relational paradigms focus on the entanglements across humans and more-than-human beings and apply an ethos of care, and practices of responsibility and response-ability. Two main objectives guide our work. First, we reflect on the impact of ontological and epistemological legacies, languages, and practices on current research and practices on transformations. Second, we aim to discuss how adopting relational paradigms can lead to ‘trans-form’ ourselves, our scientific practices, and the methods we use. Here, we ‘care-fully’ weave science with relational modes of knowing, being, and doing.

Ultimately, we aim to interrogate and experience working ways and practices that might help bridge the gap between recognising relational knowledges and actually allowing them to be enacted in practice.

The Collaborative Governance (CG) working group focuses on advancing research, teaching, and real-world applications of CG in social-ecological systems (SES). It integrates academic research, university-level teaching, and practitioner engagement to address environmental and sustainability challenges through transdisciplinary approaches.

The working group fosters cutting-edge research by exploring diverse theoretical perspectives – including feminist, decolonial, and political ecology approaches – and applying them to real-world collaborations. It investigates factors enabling governance diversity, power-sharing, and collective agency, while also addressing digital justice and AI ethics in governance. Methodologically, the group employs multi-method approaches, including network analysis, ethnography, Indigenous-led research, and case studies across various domains like protected areas, urban governance, and agriculture.

Beyond academia, the working group bridges research and practice through knowledge hubs, policy briefs, and collaborative partnerships. By integrating research, teaching, and outreach, it aims to provide actionable insights for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to enhance collaborative governance in diverse contexts.

This working group focuses on strengthening strategic foresight and deliberative governance in social-ecological systems (SES). Rather than treating foresight as forecasting, the group approaches it as a collective learning process that recognises the plurality of possible futures and makes explicit the values, trade-offs, and power dynamics that shape them. Deliberative governance is understood as structured dialogue that enables mutual recognition of competing interests — not consensus at all costs, but meaningful negotiation of what is at stake and for whom.

The group brings together applied research across forest, agricultural, and coastal landscapes, with regional experience spanning Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australasia, and Europe. Methodologically, the group works with participatory modelling, strategy games, and structured debrief and dialogue formats to help stakeholders make sense of social-ecological change in complex and contested landscapes.

Beyond individual projects, the working group aims to synthesize experiences across regions, sectors, and governance settings, and to foster a community of practice that bridges science, policy, and practice for more informed and responsible decision-making in SES.

Law and legal systems shape and are shaped by social-ecological systems (SES). While the law as a governance system seeks to influence SES, SES dynamics also influence how the law takes shape and operates. The working group aims to trace and better understand the role of law in SES from both angles, ranging from micro- to macro-level interactions. It establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue and cooperation between SES and legal scholars and thus strengthens joint research in a field that is so far underexplored.

The working group focuses on:

• Theory, i.e. the question of how theories and concepts from SES and legal research can benefit from each other
• Methods, i.e. the question what a SES perspective on the law and a legal perspective in SES research imply for the choice of research approaches and methods
  
• Practice and empirical evidence, i.e., the current and potential future role of law in focal SES across jurisdictions and fields of application

This working group focuses on integrating human wellbeing indicators into social-ecological system (SES) monitoring to enhance adaptive, ecosystem-based management. While there is growing recognition of the need to assess social outcomes alongside ecological data, guidance on developing and implementing wellbeing indicators remains limited. This working group facilitates knowledge exchange on designing, localizing, and evaluating these indicators across diverse resource and geographic contexts.

The group aims to build a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners, fostering innovation in social-ecological monitoring. It will share best practices, empirical examples, and lessons learned while co-developing databases, decision-support tools, and synthesis papers to support policymakers and managers. A key focus is bridging biophysical and social data, addressing integration challenges, and strengthening interdisciplinary skills. By promoting co-production between researchers and resource managers, enhancing data transparency, and improving measurement consistency, the working group seeks to advance holistic SES monitoring and support more effective sustainability policies and practices.

The SES Research Methods Community of Practice working group aims to advance social-ecological systems (SES) research by fostering methodological innovation, capacity building, and collaboration. It addresses key challenges such as the lack of standardized methods, limited methodological training, and the need for critical engagement with epistemological and ontological assumptions. The working group provides a supportive space for researchers to learn from both successes and failures, select appropriate methodologies, and navigate ethical and scientific rigor.

Through mentorship programs, hackathons, short courses, masterclasses, and seminars, the working group promotes knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary engagement. It contributes to academic outputs, including research papers, updated volumes of The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems, and improvements to the SES Methods website. By creating a collaborative knowledge commons and encouraging experimentation, the working group strengthens the global SES community, fosters innovative research, and nurtures the next generation of SES scholars and practitioners through both formal and informal learning opportunities.

This working group explores the transformative role of arts-based methods in social-ecological systems (SES) research. Knowledge co-production processes, where creative practices such as storytelling, music, theatre, and design are centred, increasingly help facilitate communication and connection, foster diverse knowledge exchange, and support collective learning. By attending to affect, care, and wellbeing in research, these methods help transcend disciplinary and epistemological boundaries and promote more inclusive and equitable responses to SES challenges.

The working group offers a space to examine how arts-based methods align with SES research, support transformative inquiry, enable ethical and place-based participatory approaches, and challenge hierarchical and colonial research tendencies. Through co-learning sessions, reading groups, and webinars, the working group explores how arts-based methods have and could be applied, drawing insights from literature and experts within and beyond the SocSES community. Ultimately, the working group seeks to inspire researchers to collaborate and integrate these methods into their work.

The Artificial Intelligence in Resilience (AIR) working group explores the innovative application of AI to enhance the resilience of interconnected social-ecological systems (SES). In response to climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion, the group aims to harness AI for better understanding, prediction, and management of complex environmental and social dynamics.

Key areas of focus include ecological modeling, adaptive resource management, disaster response, and community resilience. By integrating AI with diverse data sources – such as satellite imagery and socio-economic indicators – the working group seeks to develop predictive tools and dynamic decision-support systems that help stakeholders mitigate risks and optimize resource use.

The group prioritizes ethical AI practices, ensuring transparency, inclusivity, and ecological sustainability to prevent unintended harm. Through interdisciplinary collaboration among AI researchers, ecologists, social scientists, and policymakers, the working group will foster knowledge exchange and develop scalable, equitable solutions that empower communities to build resilience in the face of global change.

This working group focuses on understanding and predicting regime shifts – large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the structure and function of social-ecological systems. These phenomena are expected to occur with increasing frequency and intensity in the coming century – drastically impacting ecosystems and human wellbeing. Therefore, how to better predict the risk of regime shifts remains a crucial open question and knowledge gap to develop anticipatory governance mechanisms.

Recognising that current data is biased toward the Global North and well-studied areas, the group aims to first expand the empirical evidence within the Regime Shifts Database by documenting case studies in underrepresented regions. To contribute to cross-scale science-policy agendas, the group will co-convene a national or regional synthesis report in collaboration with the Global Tipping Points Report. The team aims to collaborate with other SocSES working groups and hubs where possible and will host an online seminar series for the SocSES community, particularly early-career researchers.

Additionally, this group hopes to conduct collaborative modelling experiments that could lead to a special issue on the problem of prediction. Ultimately, this working group aims to bridge the gap between theoretical modelling and practical decision-making by testing predictive approaches to better communicate and manage the risks of crossing tipping points in social-ecological systems.

This working group aims to advance resilience theory by developing and applying innovative quantitative metrics and models for social-ecological systems. While resilience is a key concept in sustainability research, measuring it remains challenging, often lacking strong connections to resilience theory. This group seeks to bridge this gap by refining existing approaches and introducing novel methodologies, such as pathway diversity and active inference, to assess resilience across different scales—from local communities to the global level.

Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the working group will explore modeling techniques, including dynamic systems, agent-based models, and AI-driven statistical models, to enhance the operational use of resilience in decision-making and policy design. Additionally, the group will support early-career researchers in applying resilience concepts within quantitative frameworks. By fostering methodological innovation and theoretical clarity, this working group will contribute to the practical application of resilience science in guiding the management of social-ecological systems.

More information on this thematic working group soon!

This working group focuses on fostering Communities of Practice (CoP) within the SocSES networks, supporting social-ecological systems (SES) researchers – particularly Early Career Professionals (ECPs) – by building trust-centric, reciprocal spaces for collaboration and support. Expanding on the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars (RAYS) CoP, established in 2022, this group will share insights and methodologies for creating and maintaining virtual and in-person communities.

The working group emphasizes creativity and accessibility through initiatives like podcast creation, charter development, and innovative autoethnographic analysis – a method exploring how participating in supportive communities influences members’ engagement with SES research, policy, and practice. It aims to provide tangible resources, including guidance on charter creation, effective online meeting formats, and relationship-building strategies for diverse, inclusive, and just communities.

By sharing experiences and tools, this working group seeks to strengthen researcher resilience, enhance collaboration, and support the formation of new CoPs, addressing the challenge of geographical and institutional disconnectedness in global SES research.

This working group explores how young people in socio-culturally diverse communities navigate environmental change, social inequality, and uncertainty, and how their relationships with water, soil, and living systems shape aspirations, well-being, and pathways toward hopeful futures. Although many solutions to climate and sustainability challenges already exist, progress is often limited by a gap between knowledge and action. Rarely do we examine precarity through youth perspectives, particularly in rural contexts.

The group centres youth voices while strengthening local institutions’ capacity for place-responsive pedagogy, research alliances, and youth-adult partnerships. Through transdisciplinary, community-based participatory research, early-career researchers collaborate with educators, nonprofits, and community organisations to co-create tools, curricula, and facilitation practices that bridge research and action.

By examining how youth both shape and are shaped by social-ecological transformations in their communities, the group highlights relational educational practices and small-scale, place-responsive actions that can inspire leadership, counter detachment/out-migration, and contribute to positive transformations.

This working group focuses on the ethical complexities of transdisciplinary transformations research in social-ecological systems (SES). Unlike conventional SES research, which often takes a neutral, observational stance, transdisciplinary transformations research actively engages in sustainability challenges, requiring deep collaboration with diverse stakeholders. However, this immersion raises critical ethical dilemmas, such as navigating power asymmetries, ensuring non-extractive co-production, and balancing impact with ethical commitments to justice and inclusivity.

By creating a dedicated space within SocSES, this working group explores the lived ethical tensions of engaged scholars and practitioners. Through dialogues, case-based reflections, and collaborative workshops, it will generate actionable insights, tools, and methodologies for ethically grounded transformations research. Key topics include epistemic justice, researcher reflexivity, and the politics of participation. The group aims to bridge SocSES with broader transformation networks, fostering a deeper, practice-oriented understanding of ethics in knowledge co-production for sustainability transitions.

This working group focuses on advancing ethical place-based research (PBR) in social-ecological systems (SES), particularly for Early Career Professionals (ECPs). While PBR is essential for tackling complex sustainability challenges through knowledge co-production and transdisciplinary approaches, it comes with challenges such as navigating unfamiliar contexts, avoiding extractive research practices, and building trust with local communities.

The group will explore what it means to conduct ethical, impactful, and culturally sensitive PBR, ensuring research supports local communities rather than imposing external solutions. Through interactive activities, knowledge exchange, and mentorship across career stages, this working group will equip researchers with the skills to engage responsibly and reflexively in PBR.

By fostering critical reflection and shared learning, the group aims to strengthen context-relevant, solution-oriented research that amplifies marginalized voices and contributes to genuine transformative change in sustainability and equity.

This working group focuses on strengthening transdisciplinary (TD) teaching, learning, and training to address complex social–ecological system (SES) challenges. Grounded primarily in higher education, it creates a space for collective reflection on how TD is taught, supervised, and practiced across undergraduate and postgraduate contexts, with particular attention to Global South realities.

The group aims to build a Community of Practice bringing together academics, students, early-career researchers, and practitioners engaged in TD education and capacity-building. It fosters two-way learning between academia and practitioners, recognising that key TD competencies – such as facilitation, power awareness, and collaboration – often emerge from practice-based experience.

Through collaborative reflection, the group aims to strengthen capacities for meaningful TD engagement while cultivating supportive learning spaces that place principles of care at the core. It also seeks to identify how academic institutions and systems can evolve, creating conditions that enable reflexive, inclusive, and care-centred TD approaches.

The Regenerative SES working group focuses on advancing regeneration as a scientific concept within social-ecological systems. In response to the global polycrisis, where interconnected feedback loops drive unsustainability, regeneration offers a promising framework for fostering resilience and sustainability.

The group aims to refine existing conceptual frameworks on regeneration and generate empirical evidence from diverse contexts. By fostering interdisciplinary exchange, it seeks to develop a rigorous understanding of regenerative processes and how they can be operationalized for research and practice.

Additionally, the working group will evaluate social-ecological research methods to determine their suitability for studying regeneration, with a focus on cross-domain and cross-scale interactions. A key outcome will be the creation of a global database of regenerative case studies to facilitate comparative analysis. Ultimately, this initiative aspires to establish regeneration as a practical and scientifically robust approach for addressing sustainability challenges.

This working group explores the role of “seeds” – local innovations with transformative potential – in driving systemic change toward a more just and sustainable future. Building on the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes (SoGA) initiative, the group aims to understand how small-scale initiatives can scale up, out, or deep to influence broader social-ecological transformations.

By fostering collaboration among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, the working group will examine key factors that enable or hinder the growth of seed initiatives, the capacities required for transformative change, and the justice and equity implications of these dynamics. The group also supports early-career professionals and maintains a shared database of seed initiatives for comparative analysis.

Through participatory scenario-building methods, such as the Mānoa method and the Nature Futures Framework, the working group will develop diverse, bottom-up visions for more sustainable futures and provide insights into how grassroots innovations can shape global transformations.

This working group explores how relational thinking and transdisciplinary research can integrate diverse values of nature to drive transformative change toward just and sustainable human-nature relationships. Recognizing that biodiversity loss and climate crises stem from a values crisis, the group examines how marginalized or neglected values – such as biocultural diversity, customary rights, relational values, and traditional knowledge – can be surfaced and mobilized in decision-making and conservation efforts.

By using a value-based approach, the working group will reflect on fundamental questions about how and why people relate to nature and identify values as deep leverage points for transformation. A key focus is on the role of neglected voices, knowledge systems, worldviews and values in shaping sustainable and just futures.

Through novel approaches and transdisciplinary collaboration, the group aims to bridge science, practice, and policy to mainstream diverse values of nature across multiple levels, ensuring place-based impacts and contributing to global sustainability discussions.

This working group explores justice, power, and Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems as foundational dimensions of social-ecological systems (SES). While SES research increasingly engages with participation and equity, questions of justice, colonial histories, and epistemic dominance are often treated as secondary rather than as structural drivers of system dynamics and transformation.

The group examines how power relations, knowledge hierarchies, and governance arrangements shape resilience pathways, while recognising Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems as distinct and grounded in their own ontologies, values, and relationships with land and community. Through conceptual dialogue, case reflections and collaborative learning, the working group seeks to advance more ethical and accountable approaches to SES research and practice.

Our aim is to strengthen SES theory by centring justice, sovereignty, and epistemic diversity as essential foundations for transformative social-ecological change.

This working group explores how Traditional Ecological Knowledge Keepers sustain resilient socio-ecological systems through agroecological practices, forest governance systems, and foodways grounded in land rights, sovereignty, and cultural continuity. The focus is comparative in nature, integrating research from Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and Catalunya through an inter-sectoral research team including academic and Indigenous researchers. The group addresses a key gap in SES scholarship: the limited integration of traditional and biocultural knowledge systems as organising frameworks for restoration and sustainable food systems. Through comparative analysis, collaborative activities, and peer-reviewed publications, the working group will advance conceptual and policy-relevant frameworks that link agroecology, gendered Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and socioecological restoration. By connecting theory, practice, and governance, the group will contribute new directions and policy insights for socially just and ecologically grounded transformation.

This working group explores the tensions and synergies emerging from the confluence of scholarship on sustainability transformations and the posthumanist turn, where contestation gives a useful window onto the inseparability of nature and culture in social-ecological systems. This group asks how attending to the other-than-human, along multiple dimensions of power and politics across governance scales of social-ecological systems, reshapes and expands understandings of transformation pathways and meaningful change. Our aim is to move transformation discourse beyond the human, yet without losing humans in the process. The working group will strengthen capacities of social-ecological systems and transformations communities to engage with power, politics, and other-than-human agencies. We approach reflexivity as a necessary but incomplete practice: while reflexivity foregrounds researchers’ positions and assumptions, it often remains oriented toward human-centred mirroring. We therefore expand to diffraction as a transformative capacity, attending to patterns of difference, interference, and entanglement that emerge through relations between researchers and researched, human and other-than-human alike.