Abstract/Summary

Resilience is a cross-disciplinary concept relevant for understanding the sustainability of the social and environmental conditions in which we live. Most research normatively focuses on building or strengthening resilience, despite growing recognition of the importance to break resilience of, and thus transform, unsustainable social-ecological systems. Undesirable resilience (cf. ‘lock-ins’, ‘social-ecological traps’), however, is not only less explored in the academic literature but its understanding is also more fragmented across different disciplines. This disparity can inhibit collaboration among researchers exploring interdependent challenges in sustainability sciences. In this article, we propose that the term ‘lock-in’ may contribute to a common understanding of undesirable resilience across scientific fields.