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Understanding the Dynamics of Sustainable Social-Ecological Systems: Human Behavior, Institutions, and Regulatory Feedback Networks

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Abstract

I present a general mathematical modeling framework that can provide a foundation for the study of sustainability in social- ecological systems (SESs). Using basic principles from feedback control and a sequence of specific models from bioeconomics and economic growth, I outline several mathematical and empirical challenges associated with the study of sustainability of SESs. These challenges are categorized into three classes: (1) the social choice of performance measures, (2) uncertainty, and (3) collective action. Finally, I present some opportunities for combining stylized dynamical systems models with empirical data on human behavior and biophysical systems to address practical challenges for the design of effective governance regimes (policy feedbacks) for highly uncertain natural resource systems.

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Notes

  1. A note on terminology: the objects to which I refer with the term infrastructure are often called “capital.” Capital is often used to refer to private productive assets (land, buildings, machinery), whereas infrastructure is typically used to refer to public productive assets (roads, bridges, dams, fiber optic cable), i.e., the common phrases private capital versus public or shared infrastructure. In fact, both refer to exactly the same thing so I adopt the term infrastructure to refer to all instances of productive assets regardless of their ownership status.

  2. Note, technological progress will cause \(U\) to change over time, so we might replace \(U\) with \(U_{t}\) to represent a sequence of control sets analogous to \(J_{t}\).

  3. PID controllers are constructed using a weighted (weights=”gains”) sum of three signals consisting of a (p)roportion of the error signal, the (i)ntegral of the error signal, and the (d)erivative of the error signal.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge financial support for this work from the National Science Foundation, Grant Numbers SES-0645789 and GEO-1115054.

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  1. School of Human Evolution and Social Change and School of Sustainability and Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

    John M. Anderies

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Anderies, J.M. Understanding the Dynamics of Sustainable Social-Ecological Systems: Human Behavior, Institutions, and Regulatory Feedback Networks. Bull Math Biol 77, 259–280 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-014-0030-z

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