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Complex Adaptive Systems
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The empirical evidence in the papers in this special issue identifies pervasive and difficult cross-scale and cross-level interactions in managing the environment. The complexity of these interactions and the fact that both scholarship and management have only recently begun to address this complexity have provided the impetus for us to present one synthesis of scale and cross-scale dynamics. In doing so, we draw from multiple cases, multiple disciplines, and multiple perspectives. In this synthesis paper, and in the accompanying cases, we hypothesize that the dynamics of cross-scale and cross-level interactions are affected by the interplay between institutions at multiple levels and scales. We suggest that the advent of co-management structures and conscious boundary management that includes knowledge co-production, mediation, translation, and negotiation across scale-related boundaries may facilitate solutions to complex problems that decision makers have historically been unable to solve.
Despite efforts to control fraud in public assistance programs, the perception and realities of the problem persist. Serious barriers related to data collection and research methods impede the understanding of how and why fraud occurs, thereby limiting options for improving program integrity. This article argues that based on a complex adaptive systems (CAS) perspective, social welfare fraud can be understood as a collective outcome emerging from repeated interactions among stakeholders during the routinized business processes of public assistance programs. While dealing with fraud, great attention must be paid to how it occurs and persists, not just how serious the problem is or who commits these crimes.
"We analyze the emergence of an adaptive co-management system for wetland landscape governance in southern Sweden, a process where unconnected management by several actors in the landscape was mobilized, renewed, and reconfigured into ecosystem management within about a decade. Our analysis highlights the social mechanisms behind the transformation toward ecosystem management. The self-organizing process was triggered by perceived threats among members of various local stewardship associations and local government to the area's cultural and ecological values. These threats challenged the development of ecosystem services in the area. We show how one individual, a key leader, played an instrumental role in directing change and transforming governance. The transformation involved three phases: 1) preparing the system for change, 2) seizing a window of opportunity, and 3) building social-ecological resilience of the new desired state. This local policy entrepreneur initiated trust-building dialogue, mobilized social networks with actors across scales, and started processes for coordinating people, information flows and ongoing activities, and for compiling and generating knowledge, understanding, and management practices of ecosystem dynamics. Understanding, collaborative learning, and creating public awareness were part of the process. A comprehensive framework was developed with a shared vision and goals that presented conservation as development, turned problems into possibilities, and contributed to a shift in perception among key actors regarding the values of the wetland landscape. A window of opportunity at the political level opened, which made it possible to transform the governance system toward a trajectory of ecosystem management. The transformation involved establishing a new municipal organization, the Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV). This flexible organization serves as a bridge between local actors and governmental bodies and is essential to the adaptive governance of the wetland landscape. It is also critical in navigating the larger sociopolitical and economic environment for resilience of the new social-ecological system. We conclude that social transformation is essential to move from a less desired trajectory to one where the capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-being is strengthened. Adaptability among actors is needed to reinforce and sustain the desired social-ecological state and make it resilient to future change and unpredictable events."
This article defines social resilience as the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change. This definition highlights social resilience in relation to the concept of ecological resilience which is a characteristic of ecosystems to maintain themselves in the face of disturbance. There is a clear link between social and ecological resilience, particularly for social groups or communities that are dependent on ecological and environmental resources for their livelihoods. But it is not clear whether resilient ecosystems enable resilient communities in such situations. This article examines whether resilience is a useful characteristic for describing the social and economic situation of social groups and explores potential links between social resilience and ecological resilience. The origins of this interdisciplinary study in human ecology, ecological economics and rural sociology are reviewed, and a study of the impacts of ecological change on a resourcedependent community in contemporary coastal Vietnam in terms of the resilience of its institutions is outlined.
"Innovations are introduced in the hope that they will have positive impacts on their targets, but also in the certain knowledge that there will be negative and unintended effects as well. In time, these less desired effects may also come to generate innovative and adaptive responses in a continuous, "reflexive" process. This book sets out to analyse the consequences for sustainability research and policy analysis. This collection, by many of the leading thinkers in the field, blends sophisticated theoretical discussion with practical perspectives on how to deal with the conundrum - the only thing certain about the future is that you'll be wrong about it! - Frans Berkhout, Vrije University, The Netherlands This book deals with the issue of sustainable development in a novel and innovative way. It examines the governance implications of reflexive modernisation - the condition that societal development is endangered by its own side-effects. With conceptualising reflexive governance the book leads a way out of endless quarrels about the definition of sustainability and into a new mode of collective action." © Jan-Peter Voß, Dierk Bauknecht and René Kemp 2006. All rights reserved.
We explore the social dimension that enables adaptive ecosystem-based management. The review concentrates on experiences of adaptive governance of social-ecological systems during periods of abrupt change (crisis) and investigates social sources of renewal and reorganization. Such governance connects individuals, organi-zations, agencies, and institutions at multiple organizational levels. Key persons provide leadership, trust, vision, meaning, and they help transform management organizations toward a learning environment. Adaptive governance systems often self-organize as social networks with teams and actor groups that draw on various knowledge systems and experiences for the development of a common understanding and policies. The emergence of "bridging organizations" seem to lower the costs of collaboration and conflict resolution, and enabling legislation and governmental policies can support self-organization while framing creativity for adaptive comanagement efforts. A re-silient social-ecological system may make use of crisis as an opportunity to transform into a more desired state.
We explore the simulation of urban growth using complex systems theory and cellular automata (CA). The SLEUTH urban CA model was applied to two different metropolitan areas in Portugal, with the purposes of allowing a comparative analysis, of using the past to understand the dynamics of the regions under study, and of learning how to adapt the model to local characteristics in the simulation of future scenarios. Analysis of the two case studies show the importance of SLEUTH's self-modification rules in creating emergent urban forms. This behavior can help build an understanding of urban social systems through this class of CA.
Resilience is the magnitude of disturbance that can be tolerated before a socioecological system (SES) moves to a different
region of state space controlled by a different set of processes. Resilience has multiple levels of meaning: as a metaphor
related to sustainability, as a property of dynamic models, and as a measurable quantity that can be assessed in field studies
of SES. The operational indicators of resilience have, however, received little attention in the literature. To assess a system's
resilience, one must specify which system configuration and which disturbances are of interest. This paper compares resilience
properties in two contrasting SES, lake districts and rangelands, with respect to the following three general features: (a)
The ability of an SES to stay in the domain of attraction is related to slowly changing variables, or slowly changing disturbance
regimes, which control the boundaries of the domain of attraction or the frequency of events that could push the system across
the boundaries. Examples are soil phosphorus content in lake districts woody vegetation cover in rangelands, and property
rights systems that affect land use in both lake districts and rangelands. (b) The ability of an SES to self-organize is related
to the extent to which reorganization is endogenous rather than forced by external drivers. Self-organization is enhanced
by coevolved ecosystem components and the presence of social networks that facilitate innovative problem solving. (c) The
adaptive capacity of an SES is related to the existence of mechanisms for the evolution of novelty or learning. Examples include
biodiversity at multiple scales and the existence of institutions that facilitate experimentation, discovery, and innovation.
Few issues in contemporary risk policy are as momentous or contentious as the precautionary principle. Since it first emerged in German environmental policy, it has been championed by environmentalists and consumer protection groups, and resisted by the industries they oppose (Raffensperger & Tickner, 1999). Various versions of the principle now proliferate across different national and international jurisdictions and policy areas (Fisher, 2002). From a guiding theme in European Commission (EC) environmental policy, it has become a general principle of EC law (CEC, 2000; Vos & Wendler, 2006). Its influence has extended from the regulation of environmental, technological and health risks to the wider governance of science, innovation and trade (O'Riordan & Cameron, 1994).
"The concept of resilience has evolved considerably since Holling's (1973) seminal paper. Different interpretations of what is meant by resilience, however, cause confusion. Resilience of a system needs to be considered in terms of the attributes that govern the system's dynamics. Three related attributes of social-ecological systems (SESs) determine their future trajectories: resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Resilience(the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks) has four components-latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy-most readily portrayed using the metaphor of a stability landscape. Adaptability is the capacity of actors in the system to influence resilience (in a SES, essentially to manage it). There are four general ways in which this can be done, corresponding to the four aspects of resilience. Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. "The implications of this interpretation of SES dynamics for sustainability science include changing the focus from seeking optimal states and the determinants of maximum sustainable yield (the MSY paradigm), to resilience analysis, adaptive resource management, and adaptive governance."
Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors underpinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. This article is a summary of a report prepared on behalf of the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 26 August 4 September 2002. We use the concept of resilience--the capacity to buffer change, learn and develop--as a framework for understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of rapid transformations. Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are structured scenarios and active adaptive management. These tools require and facilitate a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.
In the effort towards sustainability, it has become increasingly important to develop conceptual frames to understand the dynamics of social and ecological systems. Drawing on complex systems theory, this book investigates how human societies deal with change in linked social-ecological systems, and build capacity to adapt to change. The concept of resilience is central in this context. Resilient social-ecological systems have the potential to sustain development by responding to and shaping change in a manner that does not lead to loss of future options. Resilient systems also provide capacity for renewal and innovation in the face of rapid transformation and crisis. The term navigating in the title is meant to capture this dynamic process. Case studies and examples from several geographic areas, cultures and resource types are included, merging forefront research from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities into a common framework for new insights on sustainability.
Retail services are a main contributor to municipal budget and are an activity that affects perceived quality-of-life, especially for those with mobility difficulties (e.g. the elderly, low income citizens). However, there is evidence of a decline in some of the services market towns provide to their citizens. In market towns, this decline has been reported all over the western world, from North America to Australia.
The aim of this research was to understand retail decline and enlighten on some ways of addressing this decline, using a case study, Thornbury, a small town in the Southwest of England. Data collected came from two participatory approaches: photo-surveys and multicriteria mapping. The interpretation of data came from using participants as analysts, but also, using systems thinking (systems diagramming and social trap theory) for theory building. This research moves away from mainstream economic and town planning perspectives by making use of different methods and concepts used in anthropology and visual sociology (photo-surveys), decision-making and ecological economics (multicriteria mapping and social trap theory). In sum, this research has experimented with different methods, out of their context, to analyse retail decline in a small town.
This research developed a conceptual model for retail decline and identified the existence of conflicting goals and interests and their implications for retail decline, as well as causes for these. Most of the potential causes have had little attention in the literature. This research also identified that some of the measures commonly used for dealing with retail decline may be contributing to the causes of retail decline itself. Additionally, this research reviewed some of the measures that can be used to deal with retail decline, implications for policy-making and reflected on the use of the data collection and analysis methods in the context of small to medium towns.
First published by Edward Elgar publishing house http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/:
Vos, Jan-Peter ; Kemp, Rene: Sustainability and reflexive governance : introduction. - In: Vos, Jan-Peter ; Bauknecht, Dierk and Kemp, Rene: Reflexive governance for sustainable development. - Cheltenham : Edward Elgar, 2006. - ISBN: 978-1-84542-582-1. - pp. 3–30.
The aim of this study was to assess the application of cellular automata in urban modeling to give insights into a wide variety of urban phenomena, using the most commonly used urban modeling approaches including: Markov Chain, SLEUTH, Dinamica EGO modelling with the Logistic Regression (LR), Regression Tree (RT) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The effectiveness of these approaches in forecasting the urban growth was assessed in the example of Adana as a fast growing City in Turkey for the year 2023. Different models have their own merits and advantages, the empirical results and findings of various approaches provided a guide for urban sprawl modeling. The accuracy figures to assess the models were derived using Allocation and Disagreement maps together with Kappa statistics. Calibration data were from remotely sensed images recorded in 1967, 1977, 1987, 1998 and 2007. SLEUTH, Markov Chain and RT models resulted in overall Kappa accuracy measures of 75%, 72% and 71% respectively, measured over the past data using hindcasting. LR and ANN yielded the least accurate results with an overall Kappa accuracy of 66%. Different modeling approaches have their own merits. However, the SLEUTH model was the most accurate for handling the variability in the present urban development.
The concept of resilience has evolved considerably since Holling's (1973) seminal paper. Different interpretations of what is meant by resilience, however, cause confusion. Resilience of a system needs to be considered in terms of the attributes that govern the system's dynamics. Three related attributes of social-ecological systems (SESs) determine their future trajectories: resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks) has four components-latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy-most readily portrayed using the metaphor of a stability landscape. Adaptability is the capacity of actors in the system to influence resilience (in a SES, essentially to manage it). There are four general ways in which this can be done, corresponding to the four aspects of resilience. Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. The implications of this interpretation of SES dynamics for sustainability science include changing the focus from seeking optimal states and the determinants of maximum sustainable yield (the MSY paradigm), to resilience analysis, adaptive resource management, and adaptive governance.
This paper explores the linkages between social-ecological resilience and adaptive learning. We refer to adaptive learning as a method to capture the two-way relationship between people and their social-ecological environment. In this paper, we focus on traditional ecological knowledge. Research was undertaken with the Anishinaabe people of Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation, in northwestern Ontario, Canada. The research was carried out over two field seasons, with verification workshops following each field season. The methodology was based on site visits and transects determined by the elders as appropriate to answer a specific question, find specific plants, or locate plant communities. During site visits and transect walks, research themes such as plant nomenclature, plant use, habitat descriptions, biogeophysical landscape vocabulary, and place names were discussed. Working with elders allowed us to record a rich set of vocabulary to describe the spatial characteristics of the biogeophysical landscape. However, elders also directed our attention to places they knew through personal experiences and journeys and remembered from stories and collective history. We documented elders' perceptions of the temporal dynamics of the landscape through discussion of disturbance events and cycles. Again, elders drew our attention to the ways in which time was marked by cultural references to seasons and moons. The social memory of landscape dynamics was documented as a combination of biogeophysical structures and processes, along with the stories by which Iskatewizaagegan people wrote their histories upon the land. Adaptive learning for social-ecological resilience, as suggested by this research, requires maintaining the web of relationships of people and places. Such relationships allow social memory to frame creativity, while allowing knowledge to evolve in the face of change. Social memory does not actually evolve directly out of ecosystem dynamics. Rather, social memory both frames creativity within, and emerges from, a dynamic social-ecological environment. Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). Published here under licence by The Resilience Alliance.
Systems of people and nature co-evolve in an adaptive dance (Walters, 1986). Resource systems change as people seek ecosystem services, such as the harvest of stocks, manipulation of key structuring processes, removal of geophysical assets or abation of pollutant concentrations. Meanwhile, as humans are becom-ing more dependent on these ecosystem services, the ecosystems become more vulnerable to unexpected events. This process that signals a loss of ecological resilience has been described as a pathology of resource development (Holling, 1995). Complex resource systems are not easily tractable or understood, much less predictable. Nonlinear interactions among multiple variables, scale invariant processes, emergent properties from self-organization and other factors all con-tribute to unpredictability. Yet, even with these inherent difficulties, we continue attempts at making sense for management and other purposes. Due to a growing empirical base of observation, emergent patterns of these systems, including periods of stability and instability, as well as unexpected behavior due to inter-nal and external changes have been revealed (Gunderson, Holling, and Light, 1995; Berkes and Folke, 1998; Johnson et al., 1999). This paper builds on earlier work (Holling, 1978; Walters, 1986, 1997; Gunderson et al., 1995; Gunderson, 1999a) to explore these unexpected be-haviors in managed ecological systems – perceived as surprises and crises. To begin with, the conceptual basis for understanding these nonlinearities, ecologi-cal properties of resilience and adaptive capacity, and analogous properties in institutions are presented. The next section describes a set of different types of surprises, followed by a discussion of how people respond to those different types of surprises. The chapter ends with some tentative propositions on how one might move beyond sense-making and begin to manage for resilience.
Researchers studying the role institutions play in causing and confronting environmental change use a variety of concepts and methods that make it difficult to compare their findings. Seeking to remedy this problem, Oran Young takes the analytic themes identified in the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) Science Plan as cutting-edge research concerns and develops them into a common structure for conducting research. He illustrates his arguments with examples of environmental change ranging in scale from the depletion of local fish stocks to the disruption of Earth's climate system.Young not only explores theoretical concerns such as the relative merits of collective-action and social-practice models of institutions but also addresses the IDGEC-identified problems of institutional fit, interplay, and scale. He shows how institutions interact both with one another and with the biophysical environment and assesses the extent to which we can apply lessons drawn from the study of local institutions to the study of global institutions and vice versa. He examines how research on institutions can help us to solve global problems of environmental governance. Substantive topics discussed include the institutional dimensions of carbon management, the performance of exclusive economic zones, and the political economy of boreal and tropical forests.
This article focuses on emergence in social systems. The author begins by proposing a new tool to explore the mechanisms of social emergence: multi agent–based computer simulation. He then draws on philosophy of mind to develop an account of social emergence that raises potential problems for the methodological individualism of both social mechanism and of multi agent simulation. He then draws on various complexity concepts to propose a set of criteria whereby one can determine whether a given social mechanism generates emergent properties, in the sense that their explanation cannot be reduced to a mechanistic account of individuals and their interactions. This combined account helps to resolve the competing claims of methodological individualists and social realists. The author’s conclusion is that the scope of mechanistic explanation may be limited due to the extreme complexity of many social systems.
Environmental problems, and human attempts to manage them, can be conceptualised as evolutionary complex systems, involving interlinked processes of physical, knowledge, technological, institutional, perceptual and behavioural change. A distinction may be made between changes in physical systems (`physical emergence'), changes in human knowledge about those systems (`knowledge emergence') and changes in human perceptions (`perceptual emergence'). While processes of physical and knowledge emergence are important, it is through perceptual emergence that a phenomenon comes to be regarded as a `problem' or `issue', potentially leading to changes in policy, institutional arrangements or behaviour. The paper proposes a soft complex systems model of the relationships between these processes, illustrated with examples from the history of air quality management in the UK. The model also has wider application in the understanding of other complex issues of environmental management.
What is it in the externally represented face of the city that makes it recognizable and imaginable? What makes some urban elements and artifacts more legible and better remembered than others? Or put more generally: What makes an object an external representation and what makes it better perceived and/or remembered? Our answer to all these questions is “the information they embody and convey”. Some elements, including those that compose the face of the city, are quantitatively and qualitatively more informative than others and are therefore more legible and better perceived and remembered, quantitatively, in terms of Shannon's theory of information (The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1949), and qualitatively in terms of Haken's (Information and Self-organization: a Macroscopic Approach to Complex Systems, Springer, Heidelberg, 1988/2000) notion of semantic information. In this paper, we elaborate on this point of view in three steps: In the first, we introduce Shannonian information and show how it can be used to define the amount of information externally represented in different urban elements. In the second, we show how this is related to processes of grouping and categorization that give meaning to the face of the city and thus form its semantic information. In the third, we discuss implications for cognition in general and for cognitive mapping in particular.
In the last decade ‘sectoral systems of innovation’ have emerged as a new approach in innovation studies. This article makes four contributions to the approach by addressing some open issues. The first contribution is to explicitly incorporate the user side in the analysis. Hence, the unit of analysis is widened from sectoral systems of innovation to socio-technical systems. The second contribution is to suggest an analytical distinction between systems, actors involved in them, and the institutions which guide actor’s perceptions and activities. Thirdly, the article opens up the black box of institutions, making them an integral part of the analysis. Institutions should not just be used to explain inertia and stability. They can also be used to conceptualise the dynamic interplay between actors and structures. The fourth contribution is to address issues of change from one system to another. The article provides a coherent conceptual multi-level perspective, using insights from sociology, institutional theory and innovation studies. The perspective is particularly useful to analyse long-term dynamics, shifts from one socio-technical system to another and the co-evolution of technology and society.
The resilience perspective is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of social–ecological systems. This article presents the origin of the resilience perspective and provides an overview of its development to date. With roots in one branch of ecology and the discovery of multiple basins of attraction in ecosystems in the 1960–1970s, it inspired social and environmental scientists to challenge the dominant stable equilibrium view. The resilience approach emphasizes non-linear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales. The history was dominated by empirical observations of ecosystem dynamics interpreted in mathematical models, developing into the adaptive management approach for responding to ecosystem change. Serious attempts to integrate the social dimension is currently taking place in resilience work reflected in the large numbers of sciences involved in explorative studies and new discoveries of linked social–ecological systems. Recent advances include understanding of social processes like, social learning and social memory, mental models and knowledge–system integration, visioning and scenario building, leadership, agents and actor groups, social networks, institutional and organizational inertia and change, adaptive capacity, transformability and systems of adaptive governance that allow for management of essential ecosystem services.
The importance of adopting a socio-technical approach to system development is recognised by many but not widely practised. We analyse the reasons for this, considering the history of socio-technical design methods, and critiquing some of the better known socio-technical design methods to highlight problems. Based on this analysis we propose a new pragmatic framework for socio-technical systems engineering (STSE) which builds on the (largely independent) research of groups investigating work design, information systems, computer-supported cooperative work, and cognitive systems engineering. STSE bridges the traditional gap between organisational change and system development using two main types of activity: sensitisation and awareness; and constructive engagement. From the framework we identify an initial set of interdisciplinary research problems that address the engineering problem of applying socio-technical approaches in a cost-effective way, and facilitate the integration of STSE with existing systems and software engineering approaches.
"Technology is not the answer to the population problem. Rather, what is needed is 'mutual coercion mutually agreed upon'--everyone voluntarily giving up the freedom to breed without limit. If we all have an equal right to many 'commons' provided by nature and by the activities of modern governments, then by breeding freely we behave as do herders sharing a common pasture. Each herder acts rationally by adding yet one more beast to his/her herd, because each gains all the profit from that addition, while bearing only a fraction of its costs in overgrazing, which are shared by all the users. The logic of the system compels all herders to increase their herds without limit, with the 'tragic,' i.e. 'inevitable,' 'inescapable' result: ruin the commons. Appealing to individual conscience to exercise restraint in the use of social-welfare or natural commons is likewise self-defeating: the conscientious will restrict use (reproduction), the heedless will continue using (reproducing), and gradually but inevitably the selfish will out-compete the responsible. Temperance can be best accomplished through administrative law, and a 'great challenge...is to invent the corrective feedbacks..to keep custodians honest.'"
Cellular automata belong to a family of discrete, connectionist techniques being used to investigate fundamental principles of dynamics, evolution, and self-organization. In this paper, a cellular automaton is developed to model the spatial structure of urban land use over time. For realistic parameter values, the model produces fractal or bifractal land-use structures for the urbanized area and for each individual land-use type. Data for a set of US cities show that they have very similar fractal dimensions. The cellular approach makes it possible to achieve a high level of spatial detail and realism and to link the results directly to general theories of structural evolution.
The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
One of the very valuable features of Ecological Economics is its provision for publications under the rubric ‘Commentary’. In that way, essays which are not research in the strictest sense can still find proper refereed publication, and can be submitted to the further test of open colleague criticism. This paper is intended to be read in that spirit; and where criticisms are made of the work of particular scholars, that is done because of the significance of their contribution.
Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach based on bounded rationality and evolutionary mechanisms. It is assumed that individual harvesters face a choice between two harvesting strategies. The evolution of the distribution of strategies in the population is modeled through a replicator dynamics equation. The latter captures the idea that strategies yielding above average profits are demanded more than strategies yielding below average profits, so that the first type ends up accounting for a larger part in the population. From a mathematical perspective, the combination of resource and evolutionary processes leads to complex dynamics. The paper presents the existence and stability conditions for each steady-state of the system and analyzes dynamic paths to the equilibrium. In addition, effects of changes in prices are analyzed. A main result of the paper is that under certain conditions both strategies can survive in the long-run.
This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics , 2003, 13(2), 183-200.
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