A Dynamical Systems Approach to the Stability of Complex Governance
Abstract
There is a growing understanding of resource governance, and the social-ecological outcomes that result from it, as a phenomenon that emerges from the complex interactions among autonomous actors as they work to address interconnected issues. Despite this understanding of governance as a complex system prone to constant change, the governance literatures focus on institutional design and rules, and methodological reliance on case studies and network analyses is makes it challenging to understand how different features of governance systems influence how they respond to change. Here we focus on the factors that determine dynamical stability, an indication of the systems capacity to recover from perturbations through a generalized dynamical systems modeling approach. This approach allows for generating ensembles of governance systems that capture the strategic choices that actors make in navigating governance, and computing the stability of these systems to find general principles of stability. We find that greater heterogeneity among actors, a greater number of decision centers, and greater interdependency between actors is destabilizing, while a greater number of non-resource user actors and variation in the effort actors spend on directly influencing the power of decision centers is stabilizing. This approach combines the ability to analyze dynamic and nonlinear interactions with the possibility of modeling more varied and complex systems than traditional dynamical systems analyses, making it a promising way of understanding complexity in governing the commons.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMGC13B..03M