Pathway diversity: a resilience metric sensitive to agency applied to a lake eutrophication problem

Measuring resilience has been a longstanding challenge in social-ecological research. While there are established resilience metrics, they often do not account for agency, which is crucial in social-ecological systems. Pathway diversity is a recent approach to measuring resilience that integrates systems thinking with individual-based elements, such as agency. According to this approach, resilience is larger if actors have more decision pathways and can maintain them over time. Here we measure resilience using pathway diversity within a lake eutrophication model to analyse (a) the extent to which it is sensitive to changes in agency and (b) its compatibility with more established resilience metrics. Our findings reveal that pathway diversity is sensitive to regime shifts and can provide early warnings of them. Through five policy decision-making scenarios, we then show how pathway diversity can capture constraints on decision makers’ capability and agency that affect the system’s resilience. We find that higher pathway diversity is associated with greater capability of decision-makers to influence the system. Pathway diversity addresses a critical gap by incorporating agency into a resilience metric while remaining compatible with established metrics. This work shows the potential of pathway diversity to identify resilience-based policy implications.