Panarchy: ripples of a boundary concept

How do social-ecological systems change over time? In 2002 C. S. Holling and colleagues proposed the concept of panarchy, which presented social-ecological systems as an interacting set of adaptive cycles, each produced by the dynamic tensions between novelty and efficiency at multiple scales. Initially introduced as a conceptual framework and set of metaphors, panarchy has gained the attention of scholars across many disciplines, and its ideas continue to inspire further conceptual developments. Almost 20 years after this concept was introduced, we reviewed how it has been used, tested, extended, and revised, through the combination of qualitative methods and machine learning. Document analysis was used to code panarchy features common to the scientific literature (N = 42), a qualitative analysis that was complemented with topic modeling of 2177 documents. We found that the adaptive cycle is the feature of panarchy that has attracted the most attention. Challenges remain in empirically grounding the metaphor, but recent theoretical and empirical work offer some avenues for future research.