1. Introduction Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding and Carl Folke; Part I. Perspectives on Resilience: 2. Adaptive dancing Lance Gunderson; 3. Nature and society through the lens of resilience Iain J. Davidson-Hunt and Fikret Berkes; 4. Redundancy and diversity Bobbi Low, Elinor Ostrom, Carl Simon and James Wilson; Part II. Building Resilience in Local Management Systems: 5. The strategy of the commons Lars Carlsson; 6. Management practices for building adaptive capacity Maria Tengö and Monica Hammer; 7. Living with disturbance Johan Colding, Per Olsson and Thomas Elmqvist; Part III. Social-ecological Learning and Adaption: 8. Exploring the role of local ecological knowledge in ecosystem management Madhav Gadgil, Per Olsson, Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke; 9. Facing the adaptive challenge Kristen Blann, Steve Light and Jo Ann Musumeci; 10. Caribou co-management in northern Canada Anne Kendrick; Part IV. Cross-scale Institutional Response to Change: 11. Dynamics of social-ecological changes in a lagoon fishery in southern Brazil Cristiana Seixas and Fikret Berkes; 12. Keeping ecological resilience afloat in cross-scale turbulence Janis Alcorn, John Bamba, Stefanus Masiun, Ita Natalia and Antoinette Royo; 13. Policy transformations in the US Forest Sector, 1970-2000 Ronald L. Trosper; 14. Synthesis Carl Folke, Johan Colding and Fikret Berkes.