Coupled Infrastructure Systems Research Articles

The robustness mechanism of the rural social-ecological system in response to the impact of urbanization——Evidence from irrigation commons in China

Urbanization is essential for achieving rapid development. In this process, the labor outmigration from rural areas to cities caused by urbanization has diversified the impacts on the robustness of the rural social-ecological system. However, existing research has rarely discussed the internal mechanism of the response of the rural social-ecological system to the impact of urbanization. Based on the coupled infrastructure systems framework, in this paper, the internal interactions of the rural social-ecological system responding to the impact of urbanization are discussed. An empirical test is conducted using survey data from 123 villages of 14 Chinese provinces. Focusing on the specific practice of China, this paper further discusses how the robustness of the rural social-ecological system can be ensured under external impact. The main conclusions are as follows: under the impact of urbanization, the internal interaction paths with which the rural social-ecological system maintains robustness at the operational level are not unique. These different internal interaction paths may not only make the rural social-ecological system automatically realize a virtuous and robust cycle under the impact of urbanization, they may also cause a gradual collapse of the rural social-ecological system. Further, the discussion of China’s specific practice shows that it is key to provide institutional rules to guarantee the operational processes through the collective-choice process, thus ensuring the robustness of the rural social-ecological system under the impact of urbanization. The inspection of the interaction mechanisms in this study may obtain some restricted views on the general laws that may be contained in the complex interaction within the rural social-ecological system, and provide a theoretical basis developing countries can apply to realize rural revitalization when faced with the irreversible wave of urbanization.

Population-environment dynamics across world's top 100 urban agglomerations: With implications for transitioning toward global urban sustainability.

Urbanization is a long-term global trend critical for shaping human-Earth sustainability in the Anthropocene. In past decades, much progress has been made in researching urban sustainability, particularly global assessments of the big picture and case studies of individual cities. Here we examine the world's top 100 urban agglomerations (UAs) in terms of size-that rank high on sustainability agendas and cover 28% of the global UA area-regarding four broadly concerned challenges: population shrinkage, slum development, greenness loss, and heat exposure. Instead of merely focusing on global/regional "averages" or individual cases, we take one step further to identify the "anomalies" of urban sustainability among the 100 UAs for each dimension and on the whole as multi-dimensional coupled infrastructure systems. Results show: (1) urban population of the 100 UAs increased by 36% during 2000-2020; (2) urban slums occurred in 85% of 34 examined UAs in the Global South; (3) urban greenness declined in the 100 UAs by 8% during 2000-2019; and (4) 79% of the 100 UAs were projected to have less than 30 EHDs per year during 2021-2030. Our findings provide global baselines for place-based problem-driven policymaking for the examined UAs and suggest improving urban green infrastructure as their top policy imperative. Our findings point to a critical research gap in the urban sustainability literature: Studying sustainability transitions of the "abnormally" sustainable UAs identified in this study that had exceptional performances on the four examined sustainability dimensions, e.g., Beijing of China and Milan of Italy.

Assessing sustainability through the Institutional Grammar of urban water systems

AbstractUrban water supply systems in the United States are designed to be robust to a wide range of historical hydrological conditions in both their physical infrastructure and in the institutional arrangements that govern their use. However, these systems vary greatly in their capacity to respond to new and evolving stressors on water supplies, such as those associated with climate change. Developing a more precise understanding of the complexity of interactions between the environmental and human components of urban water systems, specifically via their institutions, has the potential to help identify institutional design choices that can foster proactive transitions to more sustainable operating states. This article adapts the Institutional Grammar (IG) within the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework to assess how a heavily engineered system's institutional configuration may impact its ability to transition to more sustainable management practices. While use of the IG has historically been limited in larger‐N studies, our application demonstrates its flexibility in revealing variation in specific components across cases. The analysis finds the structure of formal institutions shape the interactions between actors differently, and that institutional diversity exists across environmental contexts. The extent to which this institutional diversity drives transitions remains an open question. The results highlight both the importance of and challenges involved with developing longitudinal data on social and natural system interactions.

The emergence and resilience of self-organized governance in coupled infrastructure systems

Studies of small-scale, self-organized social-ecological systems have contributed to our understanding of successful governance of shared resources. However, the lack of formal analytically tractable models of such coupled infrastructure systems makes it difficult to connect this understanding to such concepts as stability, robustness, and resilience, which are increasingly important in considering such systems. In this paper, we mathematically operationalize a widely used conceptual framework via a stylized dynamical model. The model yields a wide range of system outcomes: sustainability or collapse, infrastructure at full or partial capacity, and social agents seeking outside opportunities or exclusively engaging in the system. The low dimensionality of the model enables us to derive these conditions in clear relationships of biophysical and social factors describing the coupled system. Analysis of the model further reveals regime shifts, trade-offs, and potential pitfalls that one may face in governing these self-organized systems. The intuition and insights derived from the model lay ground for more rigorous treatment of robustness and resilience of self-organized coupled infrastructure systems, which can lead to more effective governance.

Highways as coupled infrastructure systems: an integrated approach to address sustainability challenges

ABSTRACT The U.S. highway system is an iconic example of civil infrastructure. Yet it also exemplifies the challenges of infrastructure sustainability. The American Society for Civil Engineers gave the American road infrastructure a grade of “D” since the roads “are often crowded, frequently in poor condition, chronically underfunded, and are becoming more dangerous.” In this paper, we seek to understand the intertwined social and technical processes that lead to this unsustainability by examining the U.S. highway system from the perspective of coupled infrastructure systems (CIS), a transdisciplinary framework that aims to analyze governance challenges of shared resources from a dynamic systems perspective. We use highways as a special example of the broader challenge of providing and maintaining the shared infrastructure of all types. Our analysis of historical data concludes that the unsustainability of highways as coupled infrastructure systems can be explained from dysfunctional information feedbacks.

Water markets as coupled infrastructure systems: comparing the development of water rights and water markets in Heihe, Shiyang and Yellow Rivers

ABSTRACTA Coupled Infrastructure Systems perspective is applied to three cases in north-western China to explain how and why water rights systems and water markets have changed since 1949. The evolution of water rights systems has been shaped by periods of water-supply projects and periods that emphasized regulatory and institutional measures to manage water resources. We argue that water supply infrastructure and water markets have been developed not in sequence but in parallel. The development of water diversion projects and nationwide market-oriented water allocation reform programmes will continue to co-evolve in the future as part of complex coupled infrastructure systems.

Refining the Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems Framework for comparative analysis of coastal system adaptation to global change

There are numerous frameworks for studying the governance of shared resources that have been discussed extensively in the literature. Although these frameworks have been applied to multiple case studies, these applications are often idiosyncratic, subject to the interpretation of the researcher, and raise concerns regarding the operational use of frameworks for case-study comparisons. As a result, insights from these studies have not lived up to the aspirations of the frameworks to generate generalizable knowledge. Here, based on several case studies and our experience using various frameworks for analyzing social-ecological systems, we undertake the task of providing a mechanism to systematically qualify interactions among ecological, social, institutional, and built infrastructure systems that impact the governance of shared resources. Specifically, we generate a series of archetypal social-ecological systems and extract from them a verb list to represent key interactions in the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework. We then extend and refine the list based on three case studies of coastal social-ecological systems. We categorize these verbs and use them to demonstrate governance patterns across the case studies. We find that governance entities predominantly seek control over paths of change directed at lower governance levels rather than acting at their own level. Governance entities shed responsibility to lower governance levels without providing necessary resources. Finally, we find high potential for the cancelation of efforts due to lack of coordination among governance entities. The set of system archetypes and associated verb list is a first step in laying the foundation for a general typology of and a standardized protocol for representing the dynamics of CIS.

Analyzing coastal coupled infrastructure systems through multi-scale serious games in Languedoc, France

In the context of global change, the South of Gard coastal region in southern France is building up an adaptation plan in order to reduce vulnerability to several external drivers, including demographic growth, sea rise, and a new environmental directive from the European Union. However, adaptations which would reduce the vulnerability of some stakeholders might increase that of others. To explore transfers of vulnerability and their consequences with local stakeholders, we designed a serious game where players take the roles of sectoral planners in different places and on different scales of the territory. We organized a game session with 50 elected people and experts coming from various sectors. This experiment showed that adaptations on the local regional scale make it possible to cope temporarily with the pressures of global change by transferring these pressures to other sub-regions, other sectors, or even other scales. Analyzing the game session, we observed four categories of vulnerability transfers: transfers that were prevented by anticipation, transfers that were prevented by chance (non-purposely), transfers that were limited by a reaction (a posteriori), and transfers that simply occurred. Transfers prevented by anticipation required complex integration of local and sectoral adaptations. Urban growth linked to strategic retreat adaptations, which was identified as the major pressure, could be partly dealt with by trade-offs involving negotiations between several sectors in several places and at several scales.

Mapping Ostrom’s common-pool resource systems coding handbook to the coupled infrastructure systems framework to enable comparative research

In the study of common-pool resource (CPR) governance, frame- works provide a metatheoretical language to describe system states, dynamics, elements, and relationships. The coding manuals which accompany CPR frame- works–in addition to providing guidelines for connecting empirical case work to conceptual variables–define a vocabulary of coding questions. For empirical work, connecting variables and coding questions with framework elements con- tributes to conceptual advance. In the process of analysis and publication, it is tempting to offer a novel framework without also developing, applying, or modi- fying the foundational questions and variables of coding manuals buttressing said frameworks. However, if the scholarly community is to generate robust knowl- edge for the study of CPR dilemmas, we must provide the underlying work of comparing across frameworks. In this paper, we report on one way the community might conduct such comparisons. We present results and challenges of using a group consensus process to link the more than 450 coding questions derived from the original Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) to the recently proposed Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework (CISF). Despite overlap, discrepancies in the conceptual positions of the IADF and CISF suggest a need to modify or create new coding variables related to concepts of system boundaries, externalities, cross-scale interactions, multi-functionality, and tech- nological change. We suggest that such work needs provisioning if commons scholars are to navigate the continued challenges of tailoring frameworks and coding manuals to evolving CPR governance dilemmas.

A Conceptual Framework for Heuristic Progress in Exploring Management Regime Shifts in Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Change Adaptation of Coastal Areas

Social conflicts related to biodiversity conservation and adaptation policy to climate change in coastal areas illustrate the need to reinforce understanding of the “matters of concern” as well as the “matters of fact”. In this paper, we argue that we must rethink adaptation from a new perspective, considering that humans together function as both ecological actors and social actors. Using international examples from the UNESCO world biosphere reserve network, we show that an ontological perspective may provide a simple and compact way to think about coupled infrastructure systems and systematic formalism, allowing for understanding of the relational matrix between actors, institutions and ecosystems. We contend that our formalism responds to three challenges. First, it encompasses the different regional contexts and policies that rely on the same ontology. Second, it provides a method to relate any local adaptation plan to the conservation paradigms that originate from the ecological modernization of policies. Third, it facilitates the discovery of drivers and processes involved in adaptation and management regime shifts by highlighting the way contextual factors configure, determine the structure of the action situation of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD) (Ostrom 2005), and how it operates.

Sequential Hazards Resilience of Interdependent Infrastructure System: A Case Study of Greater Toronto Area Energy Infrastructure System.

Coupled infrastructure systems and complicated multihazards result in a high level of complexity and make it difficult to assess and improve the infrastructure system resilience. With a case study of the Greater Toronto Area energy system (including electric, gas, and oil transmission networks), an approach to analysis of multihazard resilience of an interdependent infrastructure system is presented in the article. Integrating network theory, spatial and numerical analysis methods, the new approach deals with the complicated multihazard relations and complex infrastructure interdependencies as spatiotemporal impacts on infrastructure systems in order to assess the dynamic system resilience. The results confirm that the effects of sequential hazards on resilience of infrastructure (network) are more complicated than the sum of single hazards. The resilience depends on the magnitude of the hazards, their spatiotemporal relationship and dynamic combined impacts, and infrastructure interdependencies. The article presents a comparison between physical and functional resilience of an electric transmission network, and finds functional resilience is always higher than physical resilience. The multiple hazards resilience evaluation approach is applicable to any type of infrastructure and hazard and it can contribute to the improvement of infrastructure planning, design, and maintenance decision making.

Linking resilience and robustness and uncovering their trade-offs in coupled infrastructure systems

Abstract. Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Most studies have either focused on qualitative approaches to discuss their connections or considered only one of them under particular classes of disturbances. In this study, we present an analytical framework to address the linkage between robustness and resilience more systematically. Our analysis is based on a stylized dynamical model that operationalizes a widely used conceptual framework for social-ecological systems. The model enables us to rigorously delineate the boundaries of conditions under which the coupled system can be sustained in a long run, define robustness and resilience related to these boundaries, and consequently investigate their connections. The results reveal the trade-offs between robustness and resilience. They also show how the nature of such trade-offs varies with the choice of certain policies (e.g., taxation and investment in public infrastructure), internal stresses, and uncertainty in social-ecological settings.

Strategic behaviors and governance challenges in social‐ecological systems

AbstractThe resource management and environmental policy literature focuses on devising regulations and incentive structures to achieve desirable goals. It often presumes the existence of public infrastructure that actualizes these incentives and regulations through a process loosely referred to as ‘governance.’ In many cases, it is not clear if and how such governance infrastructure can be created and supported. Here, we take a complex systems view in which ‘governance’ is an emergent phenomenon generated by interactions between social, economic, and environmental (both built and natural) factors. We present a framework and formal stylized model to explore under what circumstances stable governance structures may emerge endogenously in coupled infrastructure systems comprising shared natural, social, and built infrastructures of which social‐ecological systems are specific examples. The model allows us to derive general conditions for a sustainable coupled infrastructure system in which critical infrastructure (e.g., canals) is provided by a governing entity that enables resource users (e.g., farmers) to produce outputs from natural infrastructure (e.g., water) to meet their needs while supporting the governing entity.Plain Language SummaryTo understand how successful and robust governance may arise in coupled infrastructure systems comprising shared natural, social, and built infrastructure, we develop a stylized model based on a widely used conceptual framework that focuses on robustness of social‐ecological systems. Analysis of the model results in conditions for sustainability of such systems that are expressed as clear relationships between biophysical and social factors. The results lay groundwork for more rigorous studies of robustness and resilience of these complex systems.

Institutions and the performance of coupled infrastructure systems

Institutions, the rules of the game that shape repeated human interactions, clearly play a critical role in helping groups avoid the inefficient use of shared resources such as fisheries, freshwater, and the assimilative capacity of the environment. Institutions, however, are intimately intertwined with the human, social, and biophysical context within which they operate. Scholars typically are careful to take this context into account when studying institutions and Ostrom’s Institutional Design Principles are a case in point. Scholars have tested whether Ostrom’s Design Principles, which specify broad relationships between institutional arrangements and context, actually support successful governance of shared resources. This article further contributes to this line of research by leveraging the notion of institutional design to outline a research trajectory focused on coupled infrastructure systems in which institutions are seen as one class of infrastructure among many that dynamically interact to produce outcomes over time.

Impacts of Groundwater Constraints on Saudi Arabia's Low-Carbon Electricity Supply Strategy.

Balancing groundwater depletion, socioeconomic development and food security in Saudi Arabia will require policy that promotes expansion of unconventional freshwater supply options, such as wastewater recycling and desalination. As these processes consume more electricity than conventional freshwater supply technologies, Saudi Arabia's electricity system is vulnerable to groundwater conservation policy. This paper examines strategies for adapting to long-term groundwater constraints in Saudi Arabia's freshwater and electricity supply sectors with an integrated modeling framework. The approach combines electricity and freshwater supply planning models across provinces to provide an improved representation of coupled infrastructure systems. The tool is applied to study the interaction between policy aimed at a complete phase-out of nonrenewable groundwater extraction and concurrent policy aimed at achieving deep reductions in electricity sector carbon emissions. We find that transitioning away from nonrenewable groundwater use by the year 2050 could increase electricity demand by more than 40% relative to 2010 conditions, and require investments similar to strategies aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels in the electricity sector. Higher electricity demands under groundwater constraints reduce flexibility of supply side options in the electricity sector to limit carbon emissions, making it more expensive to fulfill climate sustainability objectives. The results of this analysis underscore the importance of integrated long-term planning approaches for Saudi Arabia's electricity and freshwater supply systems.

Risk and resilience: strategies for security

Traditional approaches to security and safety are being challenged by ever-increasing complexity in today's socio-economic systems. New vulnerabilities are arising for many reasons: demographic shifts, trans-boundary networks, modern business practices, new systemic risks, and reliance on closely coupled infrastructure systems, among others. In such circumstances there needs to be greater allowance for uncertainty, and a different balance of proactive and reactive risk management. Decision-makers in both governments and the private sector require more comprehensive strategies that combine active management of specific risks with enhancement of generic resilience in society. Security will depend increasingly on community attributes such as social capital, informal communication networks, and organisational culture. As a general strategy for managing complex risks, this paper recommends a multilayered approach involving systems planning, risk management, resilience building, and adaptive responses.

Positioning infrastructure and technologies for low‐carbon urbanization

AbstractThe expected urbanization of the planet in the coming century coupled with aging infrastructure in developed regions, increasing complexity of man‐made systems, and pressing climate change impacts have created opportunities for reassessing the role of infrastructure and technologies in cities and how they contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Modern urbanization is predicated on complex, increasingly coupled infrastructure systems, and energy use continues to be largely met from fossil fuels. Until energy infrastructures evolve away from carbon‐based fuels, GHG emissions are critically tied to the urbanization process. Further complicating the challenge of decoupling urban growth from GHG emissions are lock‐in effects and interdependencies. This paper synthesizes state‐of‐the‐art thinking for transportation, fuels, buildings, water, electricity, and waste systems and finds that GHG emissions assessments tend to view these systems as static and isolated from social and institutional systems. Despite significant understanding of methods and technologies for reducing infrastructure‐related GHG emissions, physical, institutional, and cultural constraints continue to work against us, pointing to knowledge gaps that must be addressed. This paper identifies three challenge themes to improve our understanding of the role of infrastructure and technologies in urbanization processes and position these increasingly complex systems for low‐carbon growth. The challenges emphasize how we can reimagine the role of infrastructure in the future and how people, institutions, and ecological systems interface with infrastructure.