A framework from resilience science, developed by C.S. Holling, Lance Gunderson and colleagues, for understanding change in linked social-ecological systems. Its core is the adaptive cycle — a loop of growth, conservation, release (collapse) and reorganisation, often drawn as a figure-eight.
“Panarchy” refers to how these adaptive cycles are nested across scales, from fast and small to slow and large, and interact. Larger, slower cycles provide memory and stability; smaller, faster ones drive novelty and experimentation; and a collapse at one scale can cascade across others. It reframes systems as periodically renewing rather than settling toward a single stable equilibrium.