All linked adaptive cycles govern the behavior of a system

The adaptive cycle (rapid growth, conservation, release, and reorganization) of a social-ecological system never exists in isolation, but is affected by (and, in turn, affects) the linked adaptive cycles above and below it.

When we talk about adaptive cycles in social-ecological systems it is easy to become too focused on the specific scale in which we’re interested. … But the scale in which we are interested is connected to and affected by what’s happening at the scales above and below, both in time and space. At each scale the system is progressing through its own adaptive cycle, and the linkages across scales play a major role in determining how the system at another (linked) scale is behaving.^[1]

This implies that ”any system you can imagine is actually composed of a hierarchy of linked adaptive cycles operating at different scales (both in time and space). The structure and dynamics of the system at each scale is driven by a small set of key processes and, in turn, it is this linked set of hierarchies that govern the behavior of the whole system. This linked set of hierarchies is referred to as a ‘panarchy.’”^[2]

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