  Approaches to understanding resilience from psychology and sociology
emphasise individuals' agency but obscure systemic factors. Approaches to
understanding resilience stemming from ecology emphasise system dynamics such
as feedbacks but obscure individuals. Approaches from both psychology and
ecology examine the actions or attractors available in the present, but neglect
how actions taken now can affect the configuration of the social-ecological
system in the future. Here, we propose an extension to resilience theory, which
we label 'pathway diversity', that links existing individual, systems and
temporal theories of resilience. In our theory of pathway diversity, resilience
is greater if more actions are currently available and can be maintained or
enhanced into the future. Using a toy model of an agricultural
social-ecological system, we show how pathway diversity could deliver a
context-sensitive method of assessing resilience and guiding planning. Using a
toy state-and-transition model of a poverty trap, we show how pathway diversity
is generally consistent with existing definitions of resilience and can
illuminate long-standing questions about normative and descriptive resilience.
Our results show that pathway diversity advances both theoretical understanding
and practical tools for building resilience.
