IAM – PIMS Distinguished Colloquium: Marty Anderies

Environmental governance can be viewed as the process by which a group of individuals builds a set of feedbacks into their social and economic systems to maintain some set of stable structures that promote wellbeing. These feedbacks often take the form of institutions, the rules and norms that structure repeated human interactions. An institutional statement such as "if the fishery biomass, forest cover, groundwater level, etc. is below (above) a certain value, then extraction must (may) be adjusted downward (upward)" can be mathematically formalized as a feedback policy in a dynamical system. As such, dynamical systems theory provides a powerful set of tools to study institutions, governance, and environmental policy. In this talk, I will discuss several dynamic models of social-ecological systems that, when combined with experimental and comparative case-study techniques, can be used to explore the very rich space of environmental governance structures observed in practice, and how they may be used to address the challenge of good environmental governance.