Wolfgramm, RachelTisch, DanielNewth, JamieBhardwaj, Varun2025-03-102025-03-102024https://hdl.handle.net/2292/71621Cross-scale resilience requires organisations to move beyond a firm-level interpretation of resilience and embrace complex dynamics in social-ecological systems (Williams et al., 2021). A social-ecological system is a self-organising assembly of physical, biological and geographical elements moving through phases of an adaptive cycle (Gunderson & Holling, 2012). Cross-scale resilience is the ability of organisations to work in harmony with social-ecological systems. However, organisational literature on sustainability prioritises organisational resilience at the expense of social-ecological parameters. The literature is largely silent on how feedback effects across nested social-ecological systems shape organisations attempts to become more ecologically sustainable. Acknowledging that organisations’ attempts to achieve ecological sustainability are influenced by the geographical, biological and physical characteristics of their region and their position in global society, the research question explored the interactions between social-ecological systems and organisations implicating cross-scale resilience. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews. A total of 73 interviews were conducted with farmers involved in dairying and horticulture settings across 10 countries including India, New Zealand and Malawi among others. In order to identify both barriers to cross-scale resilience and farmers attempts across regions to become more ecologically sustainable, 42 interviews from three geographic regions were selected for thematic analysis. An analysis of the barriers identified revealed that focal-scale bias by those prioritising organisational outcomes hampers cross-scale resilience. An analysis of the attempts identified revealed that monitoring slow variables such as biodiversity and proactively enhancing functional redundancy and response diversity fosters cross-scale resilience. By combining focal-scale bias and attention to slow changes, two distinct organisational profiles were identified, ‘focal-’ and ‘cross-scale organising’. Six case studies were constructed illustrating cross-scale and focal-scale organising across three geographic regions.Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htmResilienceSustainabilityFood SystemsSocial-ecological SystemsCross-scale ResilienceEcological SustainabilityThesisCopyright: The authorAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/