Sander Van der Leeuw

Arizona State University | ASU · Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative

This is an introduction for the special collection on “Illusion of Control”.

Why are societies (partly) adopting the scientific, Western intellectual perspective so little inclined to accept that their vision of the world is much more uncertain than they assume? This paper views the illusion of control as the result of a long-term coevolution in which, in Euro-American society, the basic categories of thinking have shifted...

The paper considers narratives as dynamic memory banks and shifts understanding from emphasizing the origins of the present to the emergence of the present. In the construction of reality, imagined futures articulate with knowledge obtained in the past. In another inversion, rather than explain change and consider stability as the norm, it focuses...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include social and ecological goals for humanity. Navigating towards reaching the goals requires the systematic inclusion of perspectives from a diversity of voices. Yet, the development of global sustainability pathways often lacks perspectives from the Global South. To help fill this gap, th...

Learning, defined as the process of constructing meaning and developing competencies to act on it, is instrumental in helping individuals, communities, and organizations tackle challenges. When these challenges increase in complexity and require domain knowledge from diverse areas of expertise, it becomes difficult for single individuals to address...

Non-technical summary Our time seems to be trapped in a paradox. On the one hand, the capacity to master information has tremendously increased, but on the other hand the capacity to use the knowledge humanity produces seems at stake. There is a gap between our capacity to know and our capacity to act. We attempt to better understand that situation...

This chapter presents a relatively simple but effective model of the co-evolution of human societies and their environments in terms of the growth of their information-processing capacity. The discussion then turns to society dynamics in terms of the process of categorization, emphasizing the role of “noise”—the information discarded in any informa...

The geological record shows that abrupt changes in the Earth system can occur on timescales short enough to challenge the capacity of human societies to adapt to environmental pressures. In many cases, abrupt changes arise from slow changes in one component of the Earth system that eventually pass a critical threshold, or tipping point, after which...

Climate science provides strong evidence of the necessity of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. The IPCC 1.5°C special report (SR1.5) presents 414 emissions scenarios modelled for the report, of which around 50 are classified as '1.5°C scenarios', with no or low temperature overshoot. These emission scenario...

In this paper we conceptualize transformations as societal shifts from one basin of attraction to another. Such shifts occur when a society's information processing system is no longer fit to deal with the dynamics with which the society is involved. To understand when this might be the case, we conceive of a dynamic interaction between two domains...

Key insights on needs in urban regional governance - Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of shifts in diversity, new cross-scale interactions, decoupling from ecological processes, increasing risk and exposure to shocks. Responding to the challenges...

Non-technical summary All of humanity is facing the increasingly urgent challenge of finding pathways to the emergence of new, more sustainable patterns of living that promotes the co-evolution of natural and cultural systems. We address this challenge by proposing changes in scientific and scholarly research communities and transformations in role...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect...

The various crises that have emerged since 2000 are driven by an increasing maladaptation of our societies’ information processing capabilities to the dynamics in which our societies find themselves. These capabilities have been built up path dependently over centuries, and to understand them we need to look closely at their history. Changes in tec...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect...

In the context of sustainability and devising win-win solutions to socio-environmental challenges, this paper discusses various aspects of the fundamental role narratives play in grounding our values and institutions, impacting on our decisions and actions, and slowing down or accelerating change. Narratives are created to integrate particular even...

Green businesses based on economic, social and technological innovations are engines of green growth and climate change adaptation across the world. However, without proper interactive mechanisms with the city, green businesses are particularly vulnerable in today’s fast-changing socio-economic and political urban contexts. Existing research on cli...

Many teams have developed a wide range of numerical or categorical indicators of progress in the implementation of the SDG targets. But these indicators cannot identify why target goals have not been accomplished, whether or how they do or do not do justice to the social and cultural context in which they are applied, and how newly emerging social...

In this Open Access book, Sander van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socioeconomic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the...

Changing the scientific approach to fast transitions to a sustainable world. Improving knowledge production for sustainable policy and practice

The book is the volume of illustrations belonging with "Studies in the Technology of Ancient Pottery vol 1 by Sander van der Leeuw

During the Vth century BC, economic exchanges are deeply modified by the expansion of the sea trade and by the economic activity of the Greeks of Massilia. However, the fortified hilltop settlement of le Peigros illustrates a traditional indigenous way of life, based upon an agro-pastoral activity, and barely dealing with outside imports. Settled o...

HE SECOND AFRICAN DIALOGUE on The World in 2050 (TWI2050) brought together stakeholders to discuss pathways to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), within the planetary boundaries, and through the transformation of African agriculture and food systems. The motivation for the discussion is the understanding that for implementing the SD...

In the original publication of the article, the name of the conference was published incorrectly as “International Complex Systems Society” in abstract. The correct name is “International Conference on Sustainability Science (ICSS)”.

Holocene climate variability in the Mediterranean Basin is often cited as a potential driver of societal change, but the mechanisms of this putative influence are generally little explored. In this paper we integrate two tools–agro-ecosystem modeling of potential agricultural yields and spatial analysis of archaeological settlement pattern data–in...

Locations of sites with regard to elevation and slope. (JPG)

References for SI. (DOCX)

Holocene temperature and precipitation in the study area averaged across cultural periods. (JPG)

Cultural history of provence. (DOCX)

Managing uncertainties. (DOCX)

Potential pulse productivity of the landscape. (JPG)

Summary W1 values for landscape and exploited fractions. (DOCX)

Comparisons of the W1 means of the exploited fractions for each period to the contemporary landscape (landscape mean of pixelwise means across the period for each pixel), and of each period to every other period. (PDF)

This paper summarizes some personal impressions of the 7th conference of the International Complex Systems Society, co-organized with “Future Earth”, held in Stockholm on August 24–26, 2017. The main point is that it is urgent and important to consider the sustainability conundrum as long-term, society-driven one, and to place societal dynamics at...

A set of potential pathways to achive the Sustainable Development Goals

The World in 2050 (TWI2050) was established by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to provide scientific foundations for the 2030 Agenda. It is based on the voluntary and collaborative effort of more than 60 authors from about 20 institutions, and some 100 independent experts from academia, business, government, intergo...

The original publication was published without Acknowledgments section. The missing section is printed here.

The complexity of social-ecological systems (SES) is rooted in the outcomes of node activities connected by network topology. Thus far, in network dynamics research, the connectivity degree (CND), indicating how many nodes are connected to a given node, has been the dominant concept. However, connectivity focuses only on network topology, neglectin...

Cet ouvrage collectif présente des articles et des chapitres d’ouvrages publiés en langue anglaise dans les années 1970 et traduits en français. Ces articles constituent des contributions importantes à la théorie de l’archéologie spatiale et présentent des outils conceptuels et analytiques essentiels pour accompagner le recours de plus en plus impo...

During the Vth century BC, economic exchanges are deeply modified by the expansion of the sea trade and by the economic activity of the Greeks of Massilia. However, the fortified hilltop settlement of le Peigros illustrates a traditional indigenous way of life, based upon an agro-pastoral activity, and barely dealing with outside imports. Settled o...

Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years. One follows an older, rather neglected approach which emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions. The other emphasizes economies as complex adaptive systems. Important concepts from evolutionary theory include the distinction between...

Adaptation and maladaptation are best viewed as different phases in the relationship between a society and its (social and natural) environment. This chapter looks at that relationship over two scales (millennial and centennial) and attributes the transitions (“ tipping points”) between adaptation and maladaptation to the unintended consequences of...

This chapter calls for an approach to economic policy that takes evolutionary and complex systems theories into account. Such an approach alters the way that economic policy is framed and how policy co-depends on understanding markets as outcomes of nonmarket interactions, incomplete information, path dependency, and coordination failures. Using se...

It is clear that within the field of archaeological computational modeling, the detection and reduction of uncertainty have played far too marginal a role. To highlight why it is important to grapple with such uncertainty, this concept is here treated from a broader conceptual perspective. Perhaps most central to this endeavor is that researchers a...

Il s’agit ici de regarder les sciences dans une perspective ethnographique, en soulignant que la création des résultats scientifiques et leur évaluation par le public sont sociales et s’inscrivent dans des processus contextuels. La perte de la crédibilité scientifique au sein d’un large public, aux États-Unis en particulier, semble due au fait qu’a...

The IGBP Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System (AIMES) project has developed the notion of Earth System Science (ESS). ESS studies how the planet operates as a coupled system of interacting components, which produce emergent behaviors over and beyond the dynamics of the individual components. Many climate models used in the IPCC's...

Scientific illiteracy is an important phenomenon in western countries, and nowhere as widely spread as in the USA, where almost a third of the population – about 100 million people – close their eyes and ears as soon as science, or things scientific, are broached. Contrary to what many scientists believe, from an anthropological perspective this is...

While the concept of the Anthropocene reflects the past and present nature, scale and magnitude of human impacts on the Earth System, its true significance lies in how it can be used to guide attitudes, choices, policies and actions that influence the future. Yet, to date much of the research on the Anthropocene has focused on interpreting past and...

The 'Anthropocene' concept provides a conceptual framework that encapsulates the current global situation in which society has an ever-greater dominating influence on Earth System functioning. Simulation models used to understand earth system dynamics provide early warning, scenario analysis and evaluation of environmental management and policies....

This study examines how social and natural scientists converged on a new ontological approach to science. Three distinguishing features comprise this new approach. They include: (1) an integration of the social and ecological into a fully coupled social-ecological systems perspective, (2) a holistic view of scientific phenomena requiring a transdis...

In recent work, culminating in the book Origins and Revolutions, Clive Gamble has suggested that we need to move away from a focus on the origin of individual, cognitive abilities of modern Homo sapiens towards the development of ‘an external cognitive architecture by which hominins achieved social extension within local groups and a wider communit...

In this paper, we view creativity through the lens of innovation, a concept familiar to archaeologists across a range of contexts and theoretical perspectives. Most attempts to understand ancient innovation thus far, we argue, have been limited by their lack of capacity to cope with the multiple scales of innovation: Those that track widespread cha...

The development of human civilisations has occurred at a time of stable climate. This climate stability is now threatened by human activity. The rising global climate risk occurs at a decisive moment for world development. World nations are currently discussing a global development agenda consequent to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which...

The paper presents two socio-enironmental crises that occurred a century apart in the Comtat region of France, and investigates why the first of these was relatively quickly and efficiently overcome, whereas the second was not.

Purpose – The article aims to describe the problem- and project-based learning (PPBL) program and the institutional context at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability (SOS), with the goal of offering experience-based guidance for similar initiatives in sustainability programs around the world. Design/methodology/approach – This case st...

Sustainability science still struggles with transitioning from problem-focused to solution-oriented endeavors that yield positive impacts on mitigating sustainability challenges. This article presents and compares three sustainability science studies on the reconstruction after the 2011 triple-disaster in Japan; limited energy and livelihood option...

“When white missionaries brought the bible to Africa, they had the bible and we had the land”. They said: “let us pray”. So we closed our eyes and prayed … And when we opened our eyes, we had the bible and they had the land …”You can surrender your most valuable asset without even noticing it!Desmond TutuThe conclusion of the 2011 Nobel meeting in...

Archaeologists have begun to understand that many of the challenges facing our technologically sophisticated, resource dependent, urban systems were also destabilizing factors in ancient complex societies. The focus of IHOPE-Maya is to identify how humans living in the tropical Maya Lowlands in present-day Central America responded to and impacted...

This paper argues that we would massively increase the value of our archaeological understanding of the past for the present if we cast it differently. Rather than use a reductionist, ex-post approach (which explains the present by invoking the past, looking for origins), we should be using an “ex ante” approach that looks at the emergence of chang...

Visions about the use of nanotechnologies in the city, including in the design and construction of built environments, suggest that these technologies could be critically important for solving urban sustainability problems. We argue that such visions often overlook two critical and interrelated elements. First, conjectures about future nano-enhance...

This paper uses a case study on the evolution of the Rhine river delta to illustrate the coevolution of the environment, the technology used to exploit it, and the institutions governing it. Three strands are interwoven: (1) Achieving equilibrium between protecting and utilizing land is difficult. In this area, as a result of exploitation, agricult...

The time is ripe for a comprehensive mission to explore and document Earth's species. This calls for a campaign to educate and inspire the next generation of professional and citizen species explorers, investments in cyber-infrastructure and collections to meet the unique needs of the producers and consumers of taxonomic information, and the format...

In globalization, isolated communities are connected to larger-scale networks. A complex systems approach describes changing information flows that govern this process, articulation of rural and urban communities, transformation of risk spectra, changes in social networks, and consequences for decision-making. Based on this analysis, the paper char...

The challenges of modeling future socio-ecological states numerically suggest that qualitative understanding of system behavior should be further developed. The objective here is to identify and develop general principles of socio-ecological system behavior, supported by empirical evidence drawn from long records of regional environmental change. A...

Sustainability challenges are multitudinous, urgent, and complex. They are beyond the capacities of our current institutions to address, caused by path-dependent behaviors, and require substantial change from systems with crippling inertia. These problems are born of large-scale industrial economic policy, the rise of materialism, and the supremacy...

Is the Innovation Society sustainable? We argue that the way in which our society organizes its innovation processes generates endogenous crises, and the ideology that sustains this organization makes it difficult to confront this meta-crisis economically or politically. We claim that the key to constructing a socially sustainable future is the mob...