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Complex systems are shaped by cross-scale interactions, nonlinear feedbacks, and uncertainty, among other factors. Transdisciplinary approaches that combine participatory and conventional methods and democratize knowledge to enable diverse inputs, including those from local, informal experts, are essential tools in understanding such systems. The metaphor of a ‘bridge’ to overcome the divide between different disciplines and knowledge systems is often used to advocate for more inclusive approaches. However, there is a shortage of information and consensus on the process, methodologies, and techniques that are appropriate to achieve this. This paper compares two case studies from Peru and South Africa in which community-level assessments were conducted as part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and explores the different conceptual models used to deal with scale and complexity, the methods adopted to deal with epistemology, and the different means of dealing with uncertainty in each assessment. The paper highlights the conceptual and practical challenges encountered by each assessment and discusses some of the conceptual and practical trade-offs involved in the selection of particular approaches. We argue that a boat navigating between unknown shores may be a more appropriate metaphor than a bridge, whose starting and end points are fixed and known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the Third International Conference on the resilience of social-ecological systems chose the theme "resilience and development: mobilizing for transformation." The conference aimed specifically at fostering an encounter between the experiences and thinking focused on the issue of resilience through a social and ecological system perspective, and the experiences focused on the issue of resilience through a development perspective. In this perspectives piece, we reflect on the outcomes of the meeting and document the differences and similarities between the two perspectives as discussed during the conference, and identify bridging questions designed to guide future interactions. After the conference, we read the documents (abstracts, PowerPoints) that were prepared and left in the conference database by the participants (about 600 contributions), and searched the web for associated items, such as videos, blogs, and tweets from the conference participants. All of these documents were assessed through one lens: what do they say about resilience and development? Once the perspectives were established, we examined different themes that were significantly addressed during the conference. Our analysis paves the way for new collective developments on a set of issues: (1) Who declares/assign/cares for the resilience of what, of whom? (2) What are the models of transformations and how do they combine the respective role of agency and structure? (3) What are the combinations of measurement and assessment processes? (4) At what scale should resilience be studied? Social transformations and scientific approaches are coconstructed. For the last decades, development has been conceived as a modernization process supported by scientific rationality and technical expertise. The definition of a new perspective on development goes with a negotiation on a new scientific approach. Resilience is presently at the center of this negotiation on a new science for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]