By JULIA DAY, STEPS Centre member

The annual STEPS Centre Symposium is underway here in Sussex with 70 delegates gathered to debate this year’s theme, Reframing Resilience.

Despite the slightly cheeky title, there is a serious aim here – to explore some of the wider frontier challenges in the resilience field and try to make progress on both intellectual and practical fronts. No mean feat.

The Symposium brings together a broad spectrum of resilience thinkers from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Some are dedicated to this area – for instance the Stockholm Resilience Centre is well-represented – and for others thinking about resilience is part of thier remit.

Throughout this year the STEPS Centre has been engaging with resilience thinking using the Centre’s distinctive approach of combining development studies with science and technology studies.

As part of this work we have just published a new Working Paper – Social-ecological resilience and socio-technical transitions: critical issues for sustainability governance by Adrian Smith and Andy Stirling. The paper can be downloaded for free exclusively from our website.

We have also been gathering some resilience resources on our website ahead of the Symposium, so have a look at offerings from Frans Berkhout, Henrik Ernstson, Per Olsson, Karl Folke and more.