and M. Mander. 2012. The identification of potential resilient estuary-based enterprises to encourage economic empowerment in South Africa: a toolkit approach. ABSTRACT. It has been argued that ecosystem services can be used as the foundation to provide economic opportunities to empower the disadvantaged. The Ecosystem Services Framework (ESF) approach for poverty alleviation, which balances resource conservation and human resource use, has received much attention in the literature. However, few projects have successfully achieved both conservation and economic objectives. This is partly due to there being a hiatus between theory and practice, due to the absence of tools that help make the transition between conceptual frameworks and theory, to practical integration of ecosystem services into decision making. To address this hiatus, an existing conceptual framework for analyzing the robustness of social-ecological systems was translated into a practical toolkit to help understand the complexity of socialecological systems (SES). The toolkit can be used by a diversity of stakeholders as a decision making aid for assessing ecosystem services supply and demand and associated enterprise opportunities. The toolkit is participatory and combines both a generic "top-down" scientific approach with a case-specific "bottom-up" approach. It promotes a shared understanding of the utilization of ecosystem services, which is the foundation of identifying resilient enterprises. The toolkit comprises four steps: (i) ecosystem services supply and demand assessment; (ii) roles identification; (iii) enterprise opportunity identification; and (vi) enterprise risk assessment, and was tested at two estuary study sites. Implementation of the toolkit requires the populating of preprogrammed Excel worksheets through the holding of workshops that are attended by stakeholders associated with the ecosystems. It was concluded that for an enterprise to be resilient, it must be resilient at an external SES level,which the toolkit addresses, and at an internal business functioning level, e.g., social dynamics among personnel, skills, and literacy levels. Although the toolkit does not address the internal resilience level of an enterprise, it proved helpful at indicating which enterprises show potential resilience given current SES conditions.

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Currently more than 600 million of the 800 million people in SSA are without electricity, and it is estimated that an additional 2500GW of power is required by 2030. Although the woodybiomass market in the developed world is relatively mature, only four woody-biomass plants in SSA have been established, all of which were closed by 2013. With its affordable labour, favourable climate and well-established forestry and agricultural sectors, South Africa appears to have the potential for a successful woody-biomass industry. This paper documents a first attempt at analysing why these plants failed. It aims to contextualise the potential role of a sustainable woody-biomass sector in South Africa, through firstly developing a SES-based analytical framework and secondly, using this to undertake a retrospective resilience-based risk assessment of the four former woody-biomass pellet plants in order to identify strategies for increasing the resilience of the industry. The SES-based framework advances previous theory,

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