Operationalizing resilience: co-creating a framework to monitor hard, natural, and nature-based shoreline features in New York State

There is growing interest in the application of nature-based solutions to adapt to climate change and promote resilience, yet barriers exist to their implementation. These include a perceived lack of evidence of their functioning in comparison to conventional solutions and an inability for existing design, policy, and assessment processes to capture the multiple benefits of these solutions. Positing this as a challenge of operationalizing and measuring resilience, we argue that the concept of resilience needs to be given concrete meaning in applied management contexts. Starting with shoreline vulnerability as a policy problem and natural and nature-based shoreline features as a promising solution, we present a case study of a co-creative process to produce an interdisciplinary and locally relevant approach to understanding and capturing the benefits of natural and nature-based solutions. We develop the notion of resilience service to enable a concreteness to resilience that simultaneously takes into account ecological, technical, and social dimensions. Through the co-creative process, our researcher-practitioner network developed a monitoring framework for shoreline features in New York State to facilitate the comparison of natural and nature-based features with conventional shoreline approaches. We describe the process and assess the advantages and drawbacks of integrating scientific input and local knowledge. We present the monitoring framework, showing how the co-creative character of the process is consequential in the formulation of the final framework through the selection of parameters, indicators, and protocols. We argue that interdisciplinarity, co-creation, pragmatism, multi-scalar applicability, and policy relevance are critical principles to understand the functioning and facilitate the implementation of nature-based solutions, while recognizing that this work necessitates compromise and as such will lead to continued deliberation. We posit this is a strength of the process for it acknowledges the creation of resilience as a social process in which values are central and subject to change.