Sustainable development is defined in this paper as a set of necessary constraints in the areas of efficiency, equity and resilience of social and natural systems. This is novel in its emphasis on social resilience which captures many aspects of the institutional architecture required for sustainability. Social resilience can be observed through proxy measures associated with property rights and access to resources, through demographic changes and other measures. In addition, present day equity considerations are incorporated into the framework. The discussion focuses on coastal resources because these are often argued to be the most resilient ecosystems because of their high functional diversity. They are also argued to be socially and economically resilient because of the diversity of economic activities in coastal zones. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of the approach by exploring its implications in two studies. Firstly recent attempts to derive the economic value of ecosystem functions are presented with the limitations of this approach. In particular economic values are often site and culture specific and their influence on resource use is fundamentally determined by the property rights governing entitlements to exchange and endowment. Even if equity is incorporated into resulting values, the relative importance of ecosystems is shown to be different depending on their location. The second study is based on the conversion of mangrove forest in coastal northern Vietnam, showing again the importance of equity considerations in the sustainability of resource use decisions, and the impact of such conversion on social resilience.