  How do social-ecological systems change over time? In 2002 Holling and
colleagues proposed the concept of Panarchy, which presented social-ecological
systems as an interacting set of adaptive cycles, each of which is produced by
the dynamic tensions between novelty and efficiency at multiple scales.
Initially introduced as a conceptual framework and set of metaphors, panarchy
has gained the attention of scholars across many disciplines and its ideas
continue to inspire further conceptual developments. Almost twenty years after
this concept was introduced we review how it has been used, tested, extended
and revised. We do this by combining qualitative methods and machine learning.
Document analysis was used to code panarchy features that are commonly used in
the scientific literature (N = 42), a qualitative analysis that was
complemented with topic modeling of 2177 documents. We find that the adaptive
cycle is the feature of panarchy that has attracted the most attention.
Challenges remain in empirically grounding the metaphor, but recent theoretical
and empirical work offers some avenues for future research.
