Loss of vital ecosystem services all the way to the global scale and the far-reaching challenges posed by global environmental change pose major challenges for institutions and governance of social-ecological systems.

Human adaption cause loss of resilience
Human society may show great ability to mobilize collective action, design institutions and adapt to changing circumstances, but such an adaptation may be at the expense of changes in the capacity of ecosystems to sustain societal development.

Recent reviews highlight that human adaptation has caused loss of resilience and pushed many ecosystems close to thresholds or into alternate states with lower capacity to generate ecosystem services for society.

At worst such adaptations may generate traps and breakpoints in the resilience of a social-ecological system that triggers abrupt undesired change.

Mismatch of scales between management and ecosystems
How can improved governance help avoiding pathways of social-ecological systems that lead to constrained options for societal development and future capacity for adaptations?

Lack of an integrative perspective on social-ecological systems is only a part of the story; these problems are exacerbated by the mismatch of scales between management and ecosystems.

Changes in biophysical and social system interact in poorly understood ways creating the opportunity of major surprises and “tipping points" in both small scale and large scale systems.

Challenges in achieving rapid collective actions
Governance must be able to not only coordinate relevant actors at local, regional and global scales, but also achieve collective action rapidly enough, i.e. before essential ecosystem services are depleted or critical thresholds are transcended.

In this sense, the governance challenge lies not only in developing multilevel institutions and organizations for multiscale management of ecosystem services, but also to be in tune with the interplay between periods of incremental change when things move forward in roughly continuous and predictable ways, and sudden and often surprising change when experience is often insufficient for understanding, consequences of actions ambiguous, and the future of system dynamics often uncertain.

How do attributes of governance shape, respond to and match the dynamics of ecosystems from local to global scales?