Global systems dynamics and policy

Abstract

Many human societies on Earth have at times experienced what we would call a ‘crisis’. In the case of simple societies, in a wide range of environments throughout history, such crises have manifested themselves as famines. In complex societies, they may have taken the form of economic depressions such we are currently experiencing, social conflicts or wars of some kind between groups, or even the collapse of complete empires such as the Roman and the Chinese Empires (cf. Tainter, 1988). The recurrence of this phenomenon, at a wide range of scales from small bands to complete empires, and in virtually any environment or domain of human endeavor raises the question whether such crises are inherent in the socio-environmental dynamics of all human societies? And if that is the case, would comparative studies of a number of instances reveal to us what drives societies into such ‘crises’? The study of crises has led to many descriptive publications, case studies and doomsday hypotheses, from Gibbon (1776–1789) and Spengler (1918–1922) to Diamond (2005), but it is only in recent years that elements of a more general scientific theory of socio-environmental dynamics, including ‘societal crises’ or even ‘societal collapse’ are emerging, combining insights from four research domains. The natural sciences have contributed to the set of ideas that is sometimes called ‘the science (or theory) of complex systems’ (e.g. Prigogine, 1978; Kauffman, 1993; Bak, 1996; Levin, 1999; Mitchell, 2009). Social anthropology has contributed in the area of ‘Cultural Theory’ (Thompson, Ellis, & Wildavsky, 1990), and the sciences of organization and information have contributed to our understanding of the organization dynamics of social structures (e.g. Pattee, 1973; Simon, 1969; Huberman, 1988; White, 2001). Some of these ideas on the nature of organizations have been taken up and adapted by ecologists (e.g. Allen & Starr, 1982; O’Neill et al., 1986; Allen & Hoekstra, 1992). Finally, the first attempt at a synthesis of these different ideas comes from a collaborative effort of ecologists and social scientists (Gunderson & Holling, 2002; Holling, 2001; Walker & Salt, 2006).