The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development stresses the fundamental role science should play in implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals endorsed by the global community. But how can and should researchers respond to this societal demand on science? We argue that answering this question requires systematic engagement with the fundamental normative dimensions of the 2030 Agenda and those of the scientific community-and with the implications these dimensions have for research and practice. We suggest that the production of knowledge relevant to sustainable development entails analytic engagement with norms and values through four tasks. First, to unravel and critically reflect on the ethical values involved in sustainability, values should increasingly become an empirical and theoretical object of sustainability research. Second, to ensure that research on social-ecological systems is related to sustainability values, researchers should reflect on and spell out what sustainability values guide their research, taking into account possible interdependencies, synergies, and trade-offs. Third, to find common ground on what sustainability means for specific situations, scientists should engage in deliberative learning processes with societal actors, with a view to jointly reflecting on existing development visions and creating new, contextualized ones. Fourth, this implies that researchers and scientific disciplines must clarify their own ethical and epistemic values, as this defines accountability and shapes identification of problems, research questions, and results. We believe that ignoring these tasks, whether one is in favor or critical of the 2030 Agenda, will undermine the credibility and relevance of scientific contributions for sustainable development.

ABSTRACT. Significant and growing concerns relating to global social and environmental conditions and processes have raised deep questions relating to the ability of traditional governance regimes to manage for the complexities of social-ecological systems. The resilience framework provides a more dynamic approach to system analysis and management, emphasizing nonlinearity, feedbacks, and multiscalar engagement along the social-ecological nexus. In recent years, however, a number of scholars and practitioners have noted various insufficiencies in the formulation of the resilience framework, including its lack of engagement with the dimensions of power within social-ecological systems, which blunt the analytical potential of resilience and run the risk of undermining resiliencebased management objectives. In this analysis, we engage with this power problematic by drawing on key insights from the scholarly tradition of political ecology, suggesting that a more appreciative, thoroughgoing engagement between resilience scholarship and political ecology may allow not only a deeper treatment of power within the resilience framework but also address several important critiques of political ecology itself. We explore the shared intellectual spaces of these traditions and suggest some ways in which a critical engagement between resilience and political ecology on the subject of power better informs our understanding of socio-political dynamics within complex systems. In closing, we train the critical light backward on political ecology to suggest that an appreciative engagement with the resilience framework may assist by reasserting a more serious treatment of ecology within political ecological analyses and support the formulation of more elegant, politically tractable counternarratives to address global environmental crises.

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