This is probably the first study that has used resilience, the adaptive cycle and panarchy as a major part of the conceptual foundation for the work. Resilience (as used here) has been explored in the literature for about 30 years, the adaptive cycle originated about 18 years ago and both have been integrated within the panarchy concept for only a few years. The authors combine these concepts with soft systems science conceptual modelling tools to review and assess the character of agricultural development from an integrated perspective of economic, social and ecological changes over about 100 years. They then apply these methods in a strategic analysis of the Western Australian agricultural region.

In the process the authors explore the significance of paradigms of science and policy that come from renewable resource management and practice. These emerge from and create different modes of scientific enquiry, different philosophical foundations of theory, and different modes of management. The latter range over time from traditions of command and control, to integrated management and adaptive management, to the synthetic kind of understanding and action that comes from recent work on complex adaptive systems. The authors find that the earlier approaches of science and management have been part of the cause of the erosion of the system because of their inability to lead to remedial policy and action. They are conceptually limited and too constrained. All elements are necessary but insufficient. The science of complex adaptive systems, however, is very different from traditional disciplinary, reductionist science. It is integrated across disciplines; it assumes non-linearities, multi-stable states and operations interacting over multiple scale ranges.