Lance Gunderson is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. He and CS "Buzz" Holling coined the term "Panarchy" in their 1995 edited volume Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. They used the word to title another edited volume in 2002, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature.
‘Panarchy’ is a new term coined from the name of the Greek god Pan, a symbol of universal nature and associated with unpredictable change. It represents an alternative framework for managing the issues that emerge from the interaction between people and nature. That interaction generates countless surprises, often the result of slow changes that can accumulate and unexpectedly flip an ecosystem or an economy into a qualitatively different state. That state may be not only impoverished, but also effectively irreversible.