sustainability
transition
emergent system
What if we were to view sustainable societies and economies as emergent systems; how would this change our understanding of our goals and the transitional path or paths? This paper develops a short list of the characteristics of emergent systems that share elements with lists of goals for sustainability. The emergent system model of sustainability also suggests that the transition to sustainability should be viewed as potentially having multiple paths. In the emergent view of sustainability there are no goals, instead policies and regulations would have to be used to create the conditions that promote undirected change. Given the dominance of the planning view and the power of emergent systems view, the paths toward sustainability will probably combine regulatory structures that may require support from emergent processes.
The prevailing ideas for moving to sustainability are built on the underlying belief that our social and economic systems can be directed to move toward well articulated goals through appropriate management strategies. In this view, governments and other management groups develop goals, objectives and specific actions that need to be taken to accomplish this directed change. This paper explores an alternative view of the sustainable outcome, i.e. that a sustainable society and economy is the result of emergent behavior of the citizens acting on a very simple set of rules. This view is not meant to replace the importance of some level of central planning and governmental involvement, but to provide us with additional ways of thinking about the very complex problem of moving a society toward a sustainable future.
The many definitions and examples of "sustainable" societies and economies share elements with emergent systems. One way to appreciate the diversity of views on sustainability is to survey the introductory environmental science textbooks. Each text has its own list, and these lists differ on many levels. Nebel and Wright (2000) compiled a list of principles for how natural ecosystems work and suggested that these natural processes illustrate how a human economic/social/ecological system might work. Raven and Berg (2001) provide a list that is a mixture of goals, processes and rules that relate to sustainability. Chiras (2001) compiled three lists; one list of beliefs that represent sustainable ethics, a second list of actions that individuals can take that would support moving toward more sustainable society, and a third list that gives ecological, social and economic principles for sustainability. Chiras also argues that people need to expand their space-time scales to move toward sustainability; more people need to be aware, value and act on space scales that expand from self to family, community, state, nation and world and on time scales that extend from the present toward multiple years, centuries, and in fact eternity. The text by Miller (1985) may represent an emergent view, he claims that his text is based on "nine deceptively simple theses" that include principles and processes. His final thesis that "It's not up to "them," it's up to "us." " is a good description of emergent systems. Introductory textbooks are important in that they describe the domain for disciplines and they set out the basic metaphors and heuristic approaches expected to be used in these disciplines. Popular metaphors such as indicators as the "dashboard" (Chambers et al. 2000) or a "blueprint" for sustainable society (Pearce and 2000) are obviously based on a control and planning view of sustainability. Our students need to be equipped with additional metaphors for problem visualization based on emergent systems and complex behaviors.
For this paper we will examine national goals established by the Clinton administration (Table 1). The items in this list are uniformly stated as mid to long term goals for the United States. These goals represent desired behaviors of a system that is presumed to be sustainable. Emergent systems have identifiable behaviors that set them apart from centrally controlled or hierarchical systems (Table 2). The goals for sustainability, as stated in Table 1, contain elements and ideas that are consistent with emergent behavior. (This is a necessary but not sufficient condition to argue that sustainability is an emergent behavior.) We can read sustainable characteristics into the goals as stated, i.e. we can map Table 2 onto Table 1. Some of the goals depend on individuals or emphasize individual action (Goals 1,2,3,6,7 and 10). Some of the goals describe the results of individual actions (Goals 5, 6 and 7) based on the individuals ethics, attempt for a quality of life or civic engagement. Another set of goals implies changes at a different scale (Goals 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10) with phrases such as "ensure long term", improve the health", "move toward" or "international". Again, the purpose of this examination is to gain insight to the characteristics of a sustainable society in such a way that we will be able to move toward that condition. If "sustainability" is one possible emergent property of our current social structure, then we would act differently than if it is a consequence of top-down policies and incentives.
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Table 1: National Goals Toward Sustainable Development Source: President'sCouncil on Sustainable Development (1996). |
| Goal 1: Health and the Environment. Ensure that every person enjoys the benefits of clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. |
| Goal 2: Economic Prosperity. Sustain a healthy U.S. economy that grows sufficiently to create meaningful jobs, reduce poverty, and provides the opportunity for a high quality of life for all in an increasingly competitive world. |
| Goal 3: Equity. Ensure that all Americans are afforded justice and have the opportunity to achieve economic, environmental, and social well-being. |
| Goal 4: Conservation of Nature. Use, conserve, protect, and restore natural resources- land, air, water and biodiversity - in ways that help ensure long-term social, economic, and environmental benefits for ourselves and future generations. |
| Goal 5: Stewardship. Create a widely held ethic of stewardship that strongly encourages individuals, institutions, and corporations to take full responsibility for the economic, environmental, and social consequences of their actions. |
| Goal 6: Sustainable Communities. Encourage people to work together to create healthy communities where natural and historic resources are preserved, jobs are available, sprawl is contained, neighborhoods are secure, education is lifelong, transportation and health care are accessible, and all citizens have opportunities to improve the quality of their lives. |
| Goal 7: Civic Engagement. Create full opportunity for citizens, businesses, and communities to participate in and influence the natural resource, environmental, and economic decisions that affect them. |
| Goal 8: Population. Move toward stabilization of U.S. population. |
| Goal 9: International Responsibility. Take a leadership role in the development and implementation of global sustainable development policies, standards of conduct, and trade and foreign policies that further achievement of sustainability. |
| Goal 10: Education. Ensure that all Americans have equal access to education and lifelong learning opportunities that will prepare them for meaningful work, a high quality of life, and an understanding of the concepts involved in sustainable development. |
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Table 2: characteristic properties of emergent systems The quotes from Johnson (2001) illustrate the major differences |
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| based on individual actions | "they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent "executive branch" " |
| individuals follow simple rules |
"The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence." "They are bottom-up systems, not top-down." |
| behavior at larger or longer scales | "agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them" |
Our understanding of any socio-economic transition is likely to refer to the classical "demographic transition" model. In the demographic transition model, populations first go through a decrease in mortality due to health care and improvement in sanitation. This is followed by a decrease in the birth rate that is driven by individual families determining that there are economic benefits to having fewer children. This transition is seen as having one dominant sequence of path that is related to the industrialization of the society. Unlike the classical demographic transition, the transition to a sustainable eco-socio-economic system will undoubtedly be multidimensional and would have multiple potential paths. It may not only be that there are many feasible paths, but it may be desirable to have many paths simultaneously. The overall transition would contain at least the following contributory changes :
The transition to sustainability is a specific example of the general case of problems that are generally perceived to require multiple, simultaneous changes to be successful. For example a negotiation between three vendors and suppliers in which A supplies B, B supplies C and C supplies A, would require an agreement between all three before the transaction could be completed. The emergent view of this problem would be that there are multiple agents of each type that are free to make pair wise negotiations. As these negotiations proceed, the system reaches the general behavior of circular flow without any requirement for simultaneous agreement. In addition, variations in our society could lead to multiple paths. For example one region could decrease population growth rate which would lead to a decrease in their ecological footprint, and then a realization of postmaterialist values, whereas in another region, the overall transition might be driven by an initial reduction in consumerism. The emergent view takes advantage of these multiple paths rather than assuming there is a single optimal path.
For the purposes of this paper the two main questions are: what type of rules would lead to a sustainable transition and what type of conditions have to be in place for people to be receptive to these rules? The rules have to be stated at the level of individual citizens and choices that they make. It would be impossible to define a specific set of rules, instead I am suggesting a example set that are of the type that should work. Table 3 provides one such example set. This list has been divided into several major categories; swarm behavior, resource ethics, community activity and understanding the human experience. These rules are not religious or moral laws, but rather a set of rules for daily behavior that could lead to sustainable society under the right conditions. In the emergent view, planners and government leaders would have to consider what conditions might be necessary to support an emergent transition rather than what policies or regulations they might employ. An example set of conditions is given Table 4. It is obvious that these example sets of rules and conditions are different than traditional broad policy and regulation statements.
| Table 3: An example set of rules for individuals that could lead to an emergent sustainable society | |
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Activity in a swarm |
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| Resource ethics |
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| Community action |
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| Value different time and space scales |
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| The human experience |
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| Table 4: Example set of conditions that may be required to promote individual action from Table 3. |
| The society needs to be pluralistic and democratic and needs to value both the individual and diversity. |
| Citizens need to be aware of the problem of environmental degradation and motivated to achieve sustainability. |
| Individuals need to have intellectual capacity and thinking tools to deal with a more complex society. This would include a broader range of metaphors and heuristics. Individuals and society also need to be able tolerate uncertainty and disequilibrium. |
| There needs to be opportunities for individuals to act on their beliefs. Incentives and subsidies could be used to create venues for these actions. |
| Individual attempts at moving toward sustainability need to be visible to the community. |
One of the major differences between the centralized control and the emergent views is the underlying fitness landscape that is assumed. Top-down planning or directed change assumes that by specifying a goal and breaking that down to objectives and then identifying specific that will ultimately lead to that goal. Emergent behavior does not assume that humans will necessarily know the path to a goal ahead of time. The landscape in highly complex systems can become "squishy" in that it deforms with each movement. Emergent behavior relies on a large number of trials to explore the landscape. Top-down policy and regulation approaches try to use indicators that are easy to interpret, valid, and the results provide motivation toward some solution (Chambers et al. 2000). Simple sets of indicators that have these characteristics would also assumes a smooth landscape with no local optima. Undirected and directed change have different barriers (Arrow et al. 2000). Undirected change can be inhibited if all actions are equally rewarded, i.e. a flat fitness landscape. Individuals or subgroups won't be able to detect if they are moving toward a solution on a larger scale. Directed change can be inhibited if the group has an incorrect view of the underlying fitness landscape, in particular if there are local optima, individuals and subgroups will have trouble staying on the planned course when there are short-term losses and loss of fitness.
We will probably have a choice between top-down, emergent, or some combination. Regulatory structures, built from the top down, may require support from emergent processes, grown from the individual up. Daily and Walker (2000) argue that "strengthening national policies on the environment may well achieve nothing - on its own - given the very limited ability to enforce such regulations in many regions of the world" and that the the transition to sustainability will require involvement at a wide range of scales and diverse contributors. In their view this contribution can be facilitated by private-sector involvement. In another study, public support for environmental protection policies and expenditures is dependent on cultural factors at the level of the individual citizens' values (Inglehart 1995). His research shows that individual's attitudes toward the environment "are only one symptom of a much broader process of cultural change that is transforming not only attitudes but much of human behavior. It is reshaping orientation towards work, fertility, and consumption patterns that affect the environment directly - " . In this cultural transition, some portion of the individuals in the society are shifting to postmaterialist values and this is having a direct effect on environmental protection. This is a good example of an emergent process linked to and supporting policy. One aspect of planned development may be crucial for a emergent transition, the well planned urbanization of human population. Cities start as centers for protection and commerce but as they mature an information processing behavior emerges (Johnson 2001). Global urbanization may actually promote, rather than retard, the transition to sustainability. Including emergent systems into our views will increase the flexibility with which we address the challenge of attaining a sustainable future.
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