Part 2: Over-connected systems

So, based on the comments made by my stalwart followers on my previous blog post regarding the global system- inequality, lack of sufficient inter-disciplinarity and the difficulty of moving between multiple disciplines, I thought that a discussion on system over-connectedness was in order. This first came to me in a discussion with Mark Stafford-Smith at a GECAFS workshop where we were discussing the problems associated with socio-ecological systems modelling (or lack thereof). Ecological modelling, (e.g. climate modelling, population modelling etc...) although difficult and based on a variety of assumptions is a relatively established field because it is based on a set of physical parameters within which these systems function and the job of the modeller is merely to express these relationships mathematically and sometimes attach statistical probabilities to the likelihood of the result. We are, however, not accustomed to thinking of social systems in the same way. This is not necessarily because they are more complicated than ecological systems, but more because it requires a range of different experts in order to quantify many of the relationships that occur in social networks and it is always difficult to predict human decision-making processes upon which many of these systems are reliant.

The social system that we do model occur mainly in economics: e.g. the global financial and trade systems. These are, however, based upon a particular view of the world (for the more left-leaning of us, yes, I am referring to the neoliberal, capitalist agenda based on perfect markets etc.). This means that for those few models that do try to include both ecological and social systems (in particular models of the global food system under climate change), there is often only one view of the social world. Authors themselves have acknowledged this as problematic (Schmidhuber & Tubiello 2007), but nothing seems to have replaced this BLS model. With a system as complex as the food system, simple models based on the assumption that markets will clear and take care of distribution into the future under climate stresses on production when this evidently does not happen at the moment!

Applying systems theory to theses social and social-ecological systems further complicates things (of course!). Systems operate within set boundaries and under perturbations can respond in different ways. Either they are resilient enough (or the perturbation is insignificant enough) for them to to return to their 'stable state,' alternatively they adapt in order to operate within a new set of parameters or they go extinct entirely. This theory has been applied to ecological systems since the 1980s when it was first formulated, but recently the applicability of this body of theory to social systems has become questioned. The result has been the development of a 'network' approach. Recent work by Kali and Reyes discuss the connectedness of countries as an indicator of vulnerability to financial contagion depending on whether they were sufficiently integrated to be important nodes. The result is that well-connected countries can dampen the effects of a shock, but that when the shock originates from them, there is far more scope for spreading the effects of the shock than if it were to have occurred in a less well connected country. It can be argued that the current level of economic integration is a double-edged sword because the idea that 'when Australia sneezes, India catches the flu' holds true. There is capacity for dampening shocks under integration, but it also means that this over-reliance on the network for provision can mean that if there is a failure in one node, the whole system could be affected unless another node steps up to the plate. For example, a loss of production in one area of the world due to a shock (e.g. floods in India severely reducing rice production) could see the whole global food system affected and prices sky-rocketing. Ethical and moral arguments around 'fairness' abound in this sort of situation. Integration seems to be the best option for those countries that are vulnerable to shocks because the impacts can thereby be dampened, but will we continue to see this trend towards globalisation by the central node countries or a slow descent towards the 'fortress world' IPCC scenario? In which case we would seriously need to reconsider the assumptions upon which we base our models and try to incorporate the effects of international bodies like the UN, WTO and even international human rights organisations will have on these assumptions.

That is far too much mental effort for one day. Although probably slightly incoherent in parts, the main point of this entry is to highlight the difficulties of understanding socio-ecological systems in a quantifiable manner and how different bodies of theory can contribute towards building an understanding of this complexity. The effects of this on governance are crucial because it is virtually impossible to talk about the governance of a system that you can't even define or understand ab initio.

L