Resilience in Place-Based Sustainability Transitions: A Systematic Review of Disturbances, System Capacities and Spatial Contexts

As complex social systems face increasing environmental and societal pressures, understanding their resilience is central to sustainability transitions. We systematically review 65 empirical studies of resilience in subnational social systems and develop a conceptual synthesis of resilience through three complementary analytical lenses: disturbances, system capacities and spatial contexts. We first classify disturbances along three dimensions–temporal structure, origin and domain–highlighting their overlapping and often multi-causal nature. We further synthesize thirteen resilience characteristics into four interrelated capacities: structural, relational, governance and dynamic. Our findings show that resilience is shaped not by individual capacities but by their combination in response to different disturbances. Their prominence also varies across spatial scales, indicating that resilience is spatially embedded. We argue that resilience is therefore best understood as a place-based, multidimensional process emerging from interactions between disturbances, capacities and the contexts in which systems operate.