A synthesis of key factors for sustainability in social-ecological systems

Attempts to identify relevant variables for the success or failure of sustainable management of social-ecological systems seem to be constrained by the inconsistent organization of the variables and the difficulties arising from their lack of comparability; both of these reduce generalizability to other systems. Therefore, to date, only a few comprehensive lists of attributes relevant to the performance of socio-ecological systems exist for sustainable management. This paper integrates such lists into a synthesis of 24 concepts. The scattered evidence of why each factor is important for sustainability has been compiled through a literature review. This concept synthesis may help to overcome some of the constraints of SES research by increasing the comparability of research designs and extending analyses from that of a few concepts for a few systems to widely applicable approaches in sustainability science.