Cross-Sector Partnerships for Social–Ecological Resilience and Transformation

In an era of social–ecological crises, resilience and transformation are closely related societal ambitions, but they can exacerbate tensions between public, private, and civil society members of cross-sector partnerships (XSPs). Bridging management and organization studies with social–ecological research, we advance a panarchy framework of adaptive cycles nested across interconnected scales, in which XSPs are embedded. As portrayed in the panarchy framework, we theorize that XSPs likely focus either on resilience or transformation, or they do both but at different scales. Although they likely face more complex coordination, XSPs striving for both resilience and transformation challenge their members to decide collectively what to maintain and change in the social–ecological context that they inhabit. We outline how the practices of sensemaking, deliberation and intervention enable XSPs to grapple with these cross-scale complexities, and we use our proposed framework to introduce the articles in this special issue. Finally, we propose interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research directions to advance both the theory and the practice of XSPs in fostering social–ecological systems resilience and transformation.