Given the origins in forest ecology, the social–ecological systems concept is strongly place based. One Health requires the nested idea of local to global relationships (including individuals), but cannot afford to limit to particular local and regional ecosystems. Rather, One Health will be interested in changes in social–ecological conditions that favour zoonotic disease transfers and spread (e.g. Caron et al. 2010; Si et al. 2010), and in pandemics that transfer readily from one local or regional ecosystem to another. One Health will be far more interested than the social–ecological systems theorists (so far) in the role of animals in people’s lives (as livestock and companion animals, or wild species they eat or interact with), and in people’s behaviour patterns within those interactions (e.g. animal tending practices, supply chain behaviour cf. Dudley 2008) that foster good health or risk disease spread.

One Health will thus be interested in the linkages between specific ecosystems, or at least in the ecological basis of particular pathogens and disease vectors that might readily (and often rapidly) find opportunities elsewhere. Given the rapidity of international travel, the transfers of animals and foods under a globalised economy, and influences of migratory bird movements (Cumming 2010), One Health should be interested in one global system made up of many localised, but also highly networked, sub-systems. One Health may find the concept of resilience very useful: since we cannot prevent diseases (of animals, humans or both) altogether, or control them entirely, how can we make vulnerable people and regions more resilient to their occurrence? How can adaptive capacity be understood and enhanced, towards achieving that resilience? What are the key components of adaptive capacity and resilience (Berkes and Ross 2013; Magis 2010; Armitage et al. 2011) in a One Health practice context? Since management of risk and control of diseases is beyond any single authority’s control (human health or veterinary), what possibilities lie in looking towards adaptive governance ideas (Stirling and Scoones 2009), focused on collaboration across parties with capacity to address parts of a problem, and on taking adaptive rather than rigid approaches to solution finding.

Further, how can One Health manage the risks of conflicting activity between scales (levels within a system) when addressing crises? Adger et al. (2011) noted with respect to climate change adaptation that some case study countries worked in harmony with and empowered local people’s adaptation, whereas others over-rode good local initiative and practice with imposed national policies in ways that damaged overall capacity. The analogies for One Health are obvious: how can local practice and arrangements be harmonised with national and international effort, rather than running the risk of contradictions, conflicts, inefficiencies and increased disease risk?

One Health is interested in interactions between humans, animals and ecosystems, and hence their systems of management, towards enhancing well-being, reducing risks and making management more effective. One Health will thus have particular foci of interest within the complexity of our global social–ecological systems (which includes economic systems). Human–animal–environment interactions of particular interest to One Health are:

From the wealth of social science concepts available for understanding human thinking and behaviour, some key concepts appear particularly relevant to the points above. All of these feature within the other paradigms (see Table 1) which could well enrich missing dimensions in social–ecological systems. This analysis makes no claim to comprehensiveness: other social science concepts are potentially relevant. It concentrates on cultural, cognitive and behavioural dimensions of people–animal–ecosystem/environment interactions. Since a culture entails a coherent combination of many of these concepts, aspects of this analysis will overlap.