Resilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse that has been taken up at a rapid pace. Yet there is an apparent gap between the advocacy of social-ecological resilience in scientific literature and its take-up in policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other. This paper explores this gap by developing a performative account of how social-ecological resilience is dealt with in practice through case study analysis of how protection of biodiversity was negotiated in response to Melbourne’s recent metropolitan planning initiative. It is suggested that a performative account expands the possible opportunities for governing for social-ecological resilience beyond the concept’s use as a metaphor, measurement, cognitive frame or programmatic statement of adaptive management/co-management and has the potential to emerge through what has been called the everyday ‘mangle of practice’ in response to social-ecological feedback inherent to policy processes.