  Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are
urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of
social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little
understood. Here, we propose a framework for conceptualising and modelling
sustainability transformations based on adaptive networks. Adaptive networks
focus attention on the interplay between the structure of a social-ecological
system and the dynamics of individual entities. Adaptive networks could
progress transformations research by: 1) focusing research on changes in
structure; 2) providing a conceptual framework that clarifies the temporal
dynamics of social-ecological transformations compared to the most commonly
used heuristic in resilience studies, the ball-and-cup diagram; 3) providing
quantitative modelling tools in an area of study dominated by qualitative
methods. We illustrate the potential application of adaptive networks to
social-ecological transformations using a case study of illegal fishing in the
Southern Ocean and a theoretical model of socially networked resource users.
