Resilience and regeneration for a world in crisis

Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles of growth and renewal, regime shifts, and planetary boundaries. Regeneration highlights the role of positive, place-based and partially self-perpetuating social-ecological dynamics and seeks to foster mutualistic relationships between human and more-than-human entities. This paper lays out similarities, differences and overlaps between work on resilience and regeneration. The concept of regeneration emerged both independently of resilience as well as playing a role within resilience scholarship. We show that the literatures on resilience and regeneration have elaborated complementary ideas and can be combined to derive guidance for improved governance of social-ecological systems. Because of its explicit and proactive future-orientation, the concept of regeneration could help boost nascent efforts to enact biosphere stewardship and develop positive visions for how to re-build a world that is dominated by regenerative rather than degenerative dynamics.