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Archive for the ‘Climate change’ Category

Climate change adaptation, resilience and complexity

Posted in Climate change, Innovation, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on December 1, 2011 | 3 Comments »

With the latest round of UN climate talks  underway in Durban this week, many are rightly concerned about the agreements that will be reached (if any), and whether it will be a case of too little, too late (quite probably).

The challenges of achieving global public policy consensus aside, new research is highlighting a range of other pressing concerns that need urgent attention.

Last week saw the launch of the summary of the IPCC special report on ‘Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation’ (SREX). This was the result of a two-and-a-half year long global collaboration between 220 scientists (full disclosure: I was one of the 220 & wrote sections of chapter 6 on managing climate risks at a national level).

One of the key messages of the IPCC report is that existing risk management and adaptation measures need to be improved dramatically. Many countries were found to be poorly adapted to current extremes and risks – let alone those projected for the future.

As recent Stockholm Resilience Centre research shows, this is more than just a technical issue. In fact, the study suggests the time is ripe for a serious rethink of the way resilience and adaptation measures are being designed and implemented.

Resilience is popular. Over the last year, I have being doing an increasing amount work on this ‘big new idea’ in international affairs – for DFID, ODI and others.

While it’s clear that there is a lot of value in this area for development and humanitarian efforts, there are some conceptual and operational challenges that need to be addressed. One widespread issue that I’ve noticed is that while aid agencies are embracing resilience, they are also tending to put the underlying theoretical framework of complex systems to one side as ‘too complicated’.

The study from experts at the Stockholm Resilience Centre shows that such conceptual simplifications of resilience can have considerable downsides – in the extreme, they can lead to interventions that actually diminish resilience.

There are now hundreds (if not thousands) of major public sector initiatives that have been developed in response to climate change, in high, middle and low income countries alike. Adaptation strategies include adjusting economic activities, changing land and energy use practices, and reforms to the design and implementation of infrastructure.

The study authors evaluated nine adaptation policy responses to assess how much they were affecting the resilience of various social-ecological systems. The findings were sobering: ‘Out of the nine initiatives analysed, only three had elements that could enhance resilience as much as reducing it. The other six had effects that predominantly reduced the resilience of a system.’

The reason? Many of the policy approaches to climate risks focused too much on short-term benefits and sought simple technological fixes to problems that were more complex. Such responses, designed with a focus on one single risk factor, can inadvertently undermine the capacity to address other stresses. As the authors put it:

There is growing evidence that current policy approaches… fail to significantly address multiple and interacting factors which affect system resilience and the needs of vulnerable populations.

Such over-simplistic efforts ‘create bizarre distortions in public policy’ precisely because climate vulnerabilities are created through multiple stresses, and not single factors. The problems went beyond how risks were defined – issues of governance, feedback and learning were also identified as critical. As the authors put it:

[In those] situations in which system stresses were defined as narrow, technical problems with short-term horizons… governance structures were top-down, did little to link actors at different scales, masked system feedbacks, and did not provide incentive or structure to promote learning…. In contrast, in the two examples where the issue was framed in a broader manner, policy implementation tended to enhance characteristics that supported the ability to manage resilience, including flexibility and learning.

Is there any explanation for this widespread focus on single risk factors? There are numerous reasons cited in the study. These include:

  • a desire for readily observable metrics
  • existing political structures and incentives
  • entrenched institutional cultures, and
  • long histories of dealing with social and ecological problems in narrow and limited ways

All these factors have been identified as systemic problems in international aid agencies, both on this blog and elsewhere. Indeed, some of the most troubling manifestations of the push for simplification were to be found in developing country case studies. For example, fisheries management in Uganda and drought responses in Kenya both highlighted the importance of local sources of resilience based knowledge of local ecosystems and social networks. But in both cases, the local sources of potential resilience were diminished by actors and forces operating at wider level.

Given this important new evidence, we are left with what seems like an obvious choice. To paraphrase the study authors, do we want  efficient and effective adaptation measures, narrowly and technologically defined? Or do we want strategies that are more open-ended and innovative and seek to build resilience by understanding and strengthening local capacities?

The answer may seem obvious, but as global climate policy debates have repeatedly highlighted, in this realm the obvious choices are often the hardest agree upon. Politics and special interests clearly play a major role, and can all too often inhibit the space for  evidence-based considerations.

One would hope that the adaptation issue is less entrenched than the battle that continues to be being waged around mitigation. At the very least, policy makers and practitioners alike need to become more aware of, and work with the key finding of the study – namely that:

dealing with specific risks without full accounting of the nature of system resilience leads to responses that can potentially undermine  long–term resilience…”

In closing, and by way of some rather grim light relief, here is an award-winning climate change cartoon. It’s from 2008. Plus ca change.

(And a link to another cartoon in a piece I posted two years ago before the Copenhagen talks.)

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What Does The Atlas of Economic Complexity Mean for Development?

Posted in Climate change, Economics, Evolution, Financial crisis, Innovation, Networks, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Technology, Trade on November 3, 2011 | 11 Comments »

Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT (whose work I have blogged about previously here) have just published the deeply impressive Atlas of Economic Complexity. It is built around an innovative, network-based methodology for understanding economies and their potential for  growth. It represents perhaps the most systematic and in-depth application of the ideas and methods of complexity research to issues of development to date. Readers can download the Atlas and experiment with a powerful interactive visualiser here.

Following an interview with Cesar Hidalgo last week, this extended post explores the implications of this important new work.

I. What is the premise of the Atlas?
The basic idea underpinning the Atlas of Economic Complexity is straightforward. As Hausmann notes:

The fundamental proposition… is that the wealth of nations is driven by productive knowledge. Individuals are limited in the things they can effectively know and use in production so the only way a society can hold more knowledge is by distributing different chunks of knowledge to different people. To use the knowledge, these chunks need to be re-aggregated by connecting people through organizations and markets. The complex web of products and markets is the other side of the coin of the accumulating productive knowledge. [emphasis added]

The secret to modernity is that we collectively use large volumes of knowledge, while each one of us holds only a few bits of it. Society functions because its members form webs that allow them to specialize and share their knowledge with others.”

At the heart of the Atlas is the attempt to measure the amount of productive knowledge that each country holds by applying  network analysis techniques to this complex web.

Much standard development – and economic – thinking doesn’t engage very well with the idea of webs and networks. As Hidalgo told me, such ideas run counter to much standard thinking, which seeks to identify differences between individuals and groups based on their inherent qualities – demographic criteria and suchlike. Experts then puzzle over why, for example, communities with the same criteria, or countries with very similar starting points end up with very different development pathways and social and wealth outcomes. It turns out that in many cases, their relationships and networks prove to be a key differentiating factor. If the data is available, it is possible to develop very precise and rigorous analysis of these differences.

II.                   How does the Atlas work?
So how does the Atlas make these ideas relevant to development economics? Well, for starters, it acknowledges that accumulating productive knowledge is difficult: “For the most part, it is not available in books or on the Internet. It is embedded in brains and human networks. It is tacit and hard to transmit and acquire. It comes from years of experience more than from years of schooling. Productive knowledge, therefore, cannot be learned easily like a song or a poem. It requires structural changes. Just like learning a language requires changes in the structure of the brain, developing a new industry requires changes in the patterns of interaction inside an organization or society.”

As readers will be well aware, the social accumulation of productive knowledge has not been universal: “The enormous income gaps between rich and poor nations are an expression of the vast differences in productive knowledge amassed by different nations.”

These differences are expressed in the diversity and sophistication of the things that each nation makes. In order to put knowledge into productive use, societies need to reassemble these distributed products through teams, organisations and markets. These issues are explored in detail in the Atlas, through the concept of the ‘product space’. This is a map which captures the products made by different countries in terms of their knowledge requirements. This maps provide a way of understanding how productive knowledge is accumulated.

As Hidalgo said in interview:

Knowledge doesn’t add up like capital. There is a lot of redundancy in knowledge. Some countries may have diverse knowledge but small populations. Product space is an expression of different kinds of knowledge – and its much better than other indicators.

Cesar’s TED talk from August 2010 gives more information about this idea and how it works.

The underlying notion of this analysis is that the complexity of an economy is related to the range of useful knowledge embedded in it:

For a complex society to exist, and to sustain itself, people who know about design, marketing, finance, technology, human resource management, operations and trade law must be able to interact and combine their knowledge to make products. These same products cannot be made in societies that are missing parts of this capability set. Economic complexity, therefore, is expressed in the composition of a country’s productive output and reflects the structures that emerge to hold and combine knowledge… Increased economic complexity is necessary for a society to be able to hold and use a larger amount of productive knowledge, and we can measure it from the mix of products that countries are able to make.”

III: What does it all mean?

So what does this give us in practical terms? As a starter, representing such a huge amount of data – covering 128 countries, 99% of world trade, 97% of the world GDP and 95% of the world population – in visual form is in itself a remarkable feat. As people like Hans Rosling have powerfully demonstrated, innovations in how we visualise data can yield tremendous new insights and ideas.

Here’s an example of a product space diagram, this one for the United States. To learn more about the diagrams and how to interpret them, I would strongly recommend having a play with the visualiser, then scanning the report, then having another play.

Hausmann, Hidalgo and their team have also developed an Index of Economic Complexity to represent their data systematically. This Index tells us about the richness of the product space of a given country, and by extension, is one useful indicator of the potential to grow. It can also be used to compare economic complexity across countries, as shown in this chart showing the ranking of different countries (from 1 to 128, highest is most red).

The authors acknowledge that these ideas are not always easy to grasp, and provide a useful thought-experiment to help readers get their heads around the implications of the Index.

Think of a particular country and consider a random product. Now, ask yourself the following question: If this country cannot make this product, in how many other countries can this product be made? If the answer is many countries, then this country probably does not have a complex economy. On the other hand, if few other countries are able to make a product that this country cannot make, this would suggest that this is a complex economy.

So for example, Japan and Germany are the two countries with the highest levels of economic complexity and if a good cannot be produced there, the list of other potential countries is likely to be very short. Conversely if a product cannot be made in Mauritania or Sudan, the list of other potential countries is likely to be a long one.

One useful way of understanding the benefits of the Atlas is to think about what the analysis adds to some of the key questions in growth economics. One of the classic comparisons made in the growth literature is between African and East Asian countries – which were at comparable levels of development in the 1950s-1970s, but which are now literally worlds apart.

Hausmann and Hidalgo give their  take on this by comparing the Economic Complexity Index for Ghana and Thailand. The lessons are resonant for aid agencies. Both countries had similar levels of schooling in 1970, and Ghana expanded education more vigorously than Thailand in the subsequent 40 years, supported of course by external assistance and policy recommendations.

Despite this, “Ghana’s economic complexity and income stagnated as it remained an exporter of cocoa, aluminium, fish and forest products. By contrast, between 1970 and 1985 Thailand underwent a massive increase in economic complexity, equivalent to a change of one standard deviation in the Economic Complexity Index. This caused a sustained economic boom in Thailand after 1985. As a consequence, the level of income per capita between Ghana and Thailand has since diverged dramatically.”

The Economic Complexity Index has been shown to be a better predictor of economic growth than a number of other existing development indicators. For example, as reported in the Economist last week, it outstrips the WEF index of competitiveness by a factor of 10 in terms of the accuracy of its predictions. It also outperforms the World Governance Indicators and the standard variable used to measure human capital as predictors of growth.

There are many other rich and varied insights from the work which cannot be covered in detail here. There is also tremendous potential to build on and extend this data and analysis in the future. One of the areas I have been working on recently is on resilience, both as a means of reducing the impact of future crises and disasters, and as a means of securing development gains. This issue is understandably at the forefront of many policymakers’ minds at the moment. The network analysis underpinning the Atlas could be used as a very useful comparative indicator of economic resilience, comparing the sustainability of growth in different countries, and help us think through growth scenarios which might enhance or diminish resilience.

There may also be scope to use this kind of thinking to bring more rigour and realism to problems of industrial reform. Take for example the ubiquitous issue of how we move to low-carbon industrial strategies. It would need more data and analysis, but the product space is clearly a powerful way to start to think about the key issues in a systematic and data driven fashion. There are numerous climate change benchmarks out there but none – as far as I know – employ the kind of network analysis used in the Atlas, and so a key aspect of how industrial economies work is missed out. By understanding better the carbon reliance of a particular countries product space, it is possible to think through the implications – the likely successes and failures – of existing adaptation policies.

IV: In conclusion
Perhaps the most important contribution of the Atlas is the analytical rigour that it brings to the complex and dynamic nature of economic growth, and the ability it gives us to ask new and challenging questions more precisely. Cesar summed it up for me as follows:

What we really want to do is to inspire a new kind of conversation. Our traditional approach to economics has retained measures developed in 1930s and 1940s to deal with the situations and crises we faced back then. We think there should be a new breed of measures – that bring much more precision and resolution, and that mean we don’t continue to build our analysis on the over-simplification of a complex system.

Let’s hope we see more of this way of thinking in development debates. While there will inevitably be a degree of resistance from the old guard, it seems to me that the underlying premise of the report is something that no one could disagree with:

Ultimately, this Atlas views economic development as a social learning process, but one that is rife with pitfalls and dangers. Countries accumulate productive knowledge by developing the capacity to make a larger variety of products of increasing complexity. This process involves trial and error. It is a risky journey in search of the possible.”

Such lessons clearly need to play a much more central role in development policy and practice. Haussman, Hidalgo and their team have done us a real service with this work.

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The last refuge of the climate sceptics

Posted in Climate change on October 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Last week saw scientists at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project publish their findings that evidence of global warming was irrefutable, and this despite being funded by some of the most noted energy conservatives in the world. 

It seems that there is only one refuge left for the climate sceptics:

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Philippines turns to complexity science to strengthen disaster preparedness

Posted in Climate change, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on March 15, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Following the Japanese earthquake, the Philippines government have announced plans to explore the use of complexity science in better understanding disaster vulnerability and risk.

The effort is to be taken forward by the Congressional Commission on Science Technology and Engineering, in collaboration with the Philippine Disaster Science Management Center.

Senator Edgardo Angara, Chair of Congressional Commission was quoted in a press release making a clear connection between the Japanese earthquake and this new initiative. He said that the tragedy served as another wake up call for the Philippines to invest in the science of disaster management and preparedness. The Senator also said that this will be taken forward as an international collaboration with Japan, Taiwan and others.

A particular inspiration for this work has been the OECD’s report from the 2009 global science forum, which highlighted resilience and vulnerability to extreme events as areas that could benefit from the application of complexity science (Click here for more on the report).

This is the latest example of a growing trend to apply complexity science in disasters, as noted in a previous Aid on the Edge of Chaos post. Complexity-inspired approaches are increasingly being put forward as alternatives to the ‘classic’ ways of analysing and understanding disasters. Indeed, one of the studies quoted in that earlier post suggested that:

…complexity theory is highly relevant for disaster studies because it provides the entry point to describe disasters as the interactions between sub-systems of nature and society or hazard and vulnerability… Disasters caused by natural hazards result from the complex interactions of nature and society…”

One grim example focused on Manila itself:

Consider the following three ingredients: a mega-city in a poor, Pacific rim nation; seasonal monsoon rains; a huge garbage dump. Mix these ingredients in the following way: move impoverished people to the dump, where they build shanty towns and scavenge for a living in the mountain of garbage; saturate the dump with changing monsoon rain patterns; collapse the weakened slopes of garbage and send debris flows to inundate the shanty towns. That particular disaster, which took place outside of Manila in July 2000… was not inherent in any of the three ingredients of that tragedy; it emerged from their interaction’ (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2001 cited in Ramalingam et al, 2008, emphasis added).

More recently Wired magazine ran a fascinating account of an attempt to understand the catastrophic  interconnections between hurricanes, deforestation and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (available here). The following is an excerpt from this excellent write-up:

…cause and effect in Earth systems is distinctly nonlinear. Inputs and outputs may not be proportional: a cause with ever-so-slightly different parameters than the previous instance might result in a wildly different effect. Additionally, systems and their component sub-systems interact to produce feedback loops that can either amplify or stabilize resulting effects. Feedbacks blur the line of what is cause and what is effect…”

There is much for this important initiative to consider going forward, not least how the scientists involved will work to get international aid agencies – often insensitive to history, context and dynamics of change - to take account of the emerging findings.

More on this important new initiative to follow soon.

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The globalisation of vulnerability

Posted in Agriculture, Climate change, Conflict and peace building, Economics, Financial crisis, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Organisations, Public Policy, Resilience on January 11, 2011 | 5 Comments »

Most analysts agree that globalisation has become more intensive and dramatic in recent decades because of advances in technology, communications, science and transportation. While it can be a catalyst for development and progress, globalisation also carries significant and increasing challenges for aid policy makers and practitioners alike.

I: The new face of vulnerability?

Recent years have seen dramatic illustrations of the downsides of globalisation. Perhaps most significant of these has been the global financial crisis taking its toll on the poorest communities in developing countries.

However, the specific localised impacts and implications of such shocks often fall below the radar of research, analysis and existing monitoring systems. On the whole, these systems are too narrow in scope and too shallow in reach to capture the diverse, context-specific experiences of poor people. As Ban Ki Moon noted in the preface to ‘Voices of the Vulnerable’ in June 2010:

…in the face of the global financial crisis a number of developing countries have proven to be remarkably resilient – if judged purely in terms of economic growth. At the same time, it appears that the burden of coping has been borne disproportionately by poor and vulnerable people. This reality is poorly understood…” (emphases added)

In fact, much work on vulnerability has been traditionally undertaken in ‘disciplinary silos’ – in highly specialised ways which are often in isolation from each other. Environmental vulnerability is assessed by the climatologists, nutritional vulnerability by the food security experts, market vulnerability by the economists, disease vector vulnerability by epidemiologists, and so on. The precise nature of vulnerability is often also heavily debated, leading to differences within the silos.

The gap between this ‘stove-piped’ understanding and multi-faceted reality becomes heightened when one considers the number of ongoing global crises. The financial crisis is just one of a number of global trends (that we currently know about) which are interacting and impacting on the lives of poor and vulnerable people.

To take another example, the 2010 World Disasters Report focused on urbanisation, and found that “a high proportion of this urban growth is in cities at risk from the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and storm surges that climate change is bringing or is likely to bring.”

Along similar lines, the global food system is showing signs of strain once again. Work done during the last upswing in prices in 2008 suggested that a key requirement was better monitoring and anticipation of future bubbles. Unfortunately anticipation has not led to preventative action. All the signs are that environmental disasters - driven by climate change - and a growing speculative bubble in commodities – driven partly by changing investor patterns in the wake of the financial crisis - are pushing the world into a new food price crisis.

In the face of these trends and shocks, there is a slowly growing recognition that vulnerability itself has become globalised. Interestingly this insight has not come from within the aid sector but from organisations such as the World Economic Forum, whose Global Risk Report 2010 shows that – like the world economy – vulnerabilities are now tightly interconnected.

Global shocks and stresses have multiple, unpredictable effects and increasingly demand – but do not always trigger – diverse responses at the local level. As recent research indicates, employing language which Aid on the Edge regulars will recognise:

Cause and effect in global systems is distinctly nonlinear. Inputs and outputs may not be proportional: a cause with ever-so-slightly different parameters than the previous instance might result in a wildly different effect. Additionally, systems and their component sub-systems interact to produce feedback loops that can either amplify or stabilize resulting effects. Feedbacks blur the line of what is cause and what is effect. The global system is characterised by various sizes and degrees of complexity combined into a tangled and heaving mass of interdependent actions.

Despite these shifts in the nature of vulnerability, international aid policy and practice are still dominated by narrow, parochial approaches. Take for example the findings of a report on chronic vulnerability in Africa which found that much of the analysis undertaken by international agencies did not examine root causes and tended to divide vulnerability into immediate and structural issues. The agencies then focused their efforts on the immediate issues, allowing the structural issues to be largely ignored.

By contrast, the reality of vulnerability for most poor people was found to be “complex and nuanced… vulnerability can be influenced by gender, ethnic group and generation issues, and by contemporary and historical social processes that are often not analysed and not explained.” (emphasis added)

It would seem that it is only after things go seriously wrong that the inter-relationships between the key drivers of vulnerability become of importance to international agencies. To cite one prominent and very current example, the densely urban population in Port-Au-Prince was up until January 2010 experiencing high levels of vulnerability and multiple climactic shocks.  It was only after the 12 January earthquake that aid agencies became sensitive to this interconnected reality, by which time it was already too late for many in Haitian population. As one satirical headline put it at the time: ‘Massive earthquake reveals poor country called Haiti to the world’.

These examples give weight to the criticism I have made elsewhere – that the international community employs a ‘catastrophe-first’ model of lesson learning, which puts the emphasis on disasters striking before action is taken.

There are often good practical reasons for this – anticipation is still in its infancy, prediction is largely impossible. However, without wanting to diminish these challenges, the key is to do much more in terms of changing our mindsets.

As we argued in an ALNAP study on humanitarian innovations, there is a crucial need to find ways to move away from this catastrophe-first model of learning, towards putting vulnerability first.

II: From ‘Catastrophe-First’ to ‘Vulnerability-First’ ~ Three Ideas

This idea of putting vulnerability first has a number of possible implications, of which three are explored below.

Putting vulnerability first requires a better, more inter-disciplinary, understanding of the globalised vulnerability landscape among both policy makers and operational decision makers. As well as better shared data and analysis, we need to find better ways of breaking down disciplinary silos.

One way of doing this might be to examine how the ideas in one area might be transferred over to another. There is already some useful work in this direction, which seeks to generalise the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This suggests that vulnerability may be characterised as a function of three components: sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacities. The UNFCC shows that such vulnerabilities can be understood through a combination of top-down modelling and scenarios with bottom-up, community-based approaches which recognise and build upon local knowledge and coping strategies. An interesting manifestation of this interdisciplinary approach in action is how the notion of ‘building back better’, a mainstay of disaster risk reduction, has found its way into the dialogue on the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Putting vulnerability first also means finding ways of communicating vulnerability understanding in ways that capture the political and humanitarian imagination alike. For example, some agencies have started using the evocative image of vulnerability defined as communities and individuals ‘living on the edge’. People are living on the edge if their lives and livelihoods are exposed and sensitive to shocks and stresses, and their adaptive capacities are constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed. Living on the edge suggests that a small push could send a community or individual over the edge.

Being forced to live on the edge can have profound effects on the way people conduct their lives. It can lead to coping strategies which are overtly risk-averse – poor farmers faced with unpredictable prices might start to act in cautious and non-entrepreneurial ways even during normal times, limiting their prospects of increasing their well-being. At the other end of the spectrum, as has been found in coastal communities in Bangladesh, the desperately poor may adopt a “gambler’s throw” strategy, risking all or nothing when they know that a major livelihood shock is inevitable.

The emerging globalised vulnerabilities have already taken their tol, on poor people, and will continue to do so: increasing the numbers ‘living on the edge of disaster’, changing their geographic distribution, and increasing the diversity and unpredictability of risks faced. Successive waves of impacts have fundamentally changed coping mechanisms, reduced long term resilience for the sake of short-term coping mechanisms, undermining development prospects and making many communities more vulnerable to future shocks.

So we need to be paying much more attention to, and advocating for, people living on the edge of disaster, rather simply waiting until they have been tipped over the edge.

Finally, putting vulnerability first also means highlighting examples of good practice and innovations, and fostering national level and local engagement. Social protection, micro-insurance, community-based adaptive learning measures, and new national policy frameworks all have an important role to play in enhancing community-level and national resilience. It also means being honest about how far the international community still has to go as well as its inherent limitations. We need to see some significant organisational and professional changes in international agencies, who need to do more than simply ‘mainstream’ vulnerability. The globalised nature of vulnerability demands nothing short of a fundamental strategic re-orientation.

The final words go to Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, drawing on some of his work from last year, in which he suggests what this re-orientation might look like:

[This] line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage…

… the resilience perspective stands in stark contrast to development paradigms and global policies that… offer only minor adjustments of current behaviors, and that tend to concentrate on technical quick fixes to get rid of the problems…

...it encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world…

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Dramatic new evidence for global warming

Posted in Climate change on November 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H/t to Caetano Dorea

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What happens when you are busy making other plans

Posted in Climate change, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on April 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

John Lennon famously quipped that life was what happened when you were busy making other plans.

A new book Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice from the fantastic STEPS centre at the University of Sussex focuses on how much the same contradiction plays out in the global movements toward development, environmental sustainability and social justice.

To quote Melissa Leach, one of the book’s authors and the Director of the STEPS centre:

On the one hand, there is wide recognition of growing complexity and dynamism, but on the other hand, there appears to be an ever-more urgent search for big, technically-driven managerial solutions. When these solutions falter in the face of local dynamics and uncertainties, the response is often to implement them with greater force, or to blame locals or critics – rather than to question the underlying assumptions.

The book sets out some key approaches for more effective sustainable development that those with an interest in complex adaptive systems will instantly recognise. They include:

  1. The importance of dynamics: “…take dynamics seriously. This means moving beyond conventional approaches rooted in standard equilibrium thinking. Rather than attempting to control variability, it may often be more appropriate to develop strategies that respond to it, building resilience and robustness.”
  2. Understanding uncertainty: “…governments and institutions are increasingly preoccupied with the insecurities that threats seem to pose. However, dominant approaches involve a narrow focus on a particular (highly incomplete) notion of risk. This assumes complex challenges can be calculated and managed – excluding other situations where understanding possible future outcomes is more problematic. It is essential to have a wider appreciation of the dimensions of uncertainty if we are to avoid the dangers of creating deceptive, control-based approaches to complex and dynamic realities.”
  3. Different viewpoints: “…wider assumptions about the goals of development or sustainability… often assume that there is only one view of the problem and possible solutions. Yet different people and groups understand – or ‘frame’ – environment and development issues in very different ways; they have varying knowledge and experience, and value different goals and outcomes. Paying serious attention to multiple framings brings vital opportunities to advance debates about sustainability and connect them more firmly with social justice.”

The book focuses on a number of ‘wicked’ problems, including water scarcity in India, seeds and drought in Africa, epidemics and energy. It employs the memorable metaphor of “motorways” through which  powerful actors and institutions channel fast-moving policies and interventions, which “often [run] over valuable footpaths that respond better to poorer people’s own goals, knowledge and values, and to more dynamic contexts.” (For more on this metaphor, see a previous Aid on the Edge post comparing development management to traffic management.)

What to do in the face of such issues? Leach is clear, if challenging:

a key task for the present and the future is… opening up to practices that involve flexibility, diversity, adaptation, learning and reflexivity. It means recognising the alternative framings around which more effective, justice-oriented pathways may emerge. And it means new forms of political engagement to promote such pathways amidst deeply entrenched power and interests…

All of this chimes with another Lennon line: “Dealing with reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”

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An Equation for Copenhagen: Conformity + Rapid Change = Collapse

Posted in Climate change, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 1, 2009 | 3 Comments »

American scientists using agent-based modeling techniques have linked excessive conformity to societal collapse and even mass extinction. The implications for the Copenhagen negotiations next week seem stark.

The researchers at Dalhousie University and the University of California-Davis have modeled how well different learning strategies work in different learning environments, and found that under certain circumstances societies can be doomed by conformist social learning. Specifically, conformity can be catastrophic in “red noise environments” in which the environment is stable for long periods then undergoes major changes in sudden, unpredictable ways.

As they point out:

Rapid change puts a premium on the capacity of individuals to learn through exploration and experience, and to adapt their behavior accordingly.”

The researchers argue that the ‘conformity in the face of rapid change’ pattern has characterized many well-documented historical examples of societal collapse, including among the Mayans in the 8th and 9th century and the Greenland Norse of the 10th century.

This is not to say that conformity is a bad thing. The ability of humans to learn from each other, to imitate and emulate, has helped societies function and keep total anarchy at bay. In relatively stable settings, such social learning is more efficient than having individuals waste time re-learning what other around them already know:

During long periods with only modest amounts of change, conformist social learning is a more successful strategy than costly individual learning… The mix of individual and social learning that evolves during the quiet periods of red noise environments tends to have too little individual learning to cope with the rarer big changes.”

The enduring question remains, as highlighted previously on this blog, how innovation and diversity can be nurtured while still supporting a degree of necessary conformity. 

All too often we get it wrong and usually for some pretty simple reasons. As Luke Rendell, a scientist at the University of St. Andrews, notes:

 People might find it difficult to believe that humans, in all their complexity, would do something so stupid as to copy themselves to extinction, but in my view that may rely on an overly rosy view of human omnipotence. What matters to most people is how they are doing as individuals right now, and longer term considerations are very easily pushed down the priority listing.”

Next week COP15 will see the international community attempt to move forward on new agreements for dealing with global warming and climate change. Sadly, examples of conformity in the face of rapid change are all too prominent. Two broad conformist approaches can be identified.

First, the deniers. There is an excellent website outlining the major arguments put forward by global warming sceptics, and what existing science really says about each of these arguments. There is an entire industry dedicated to discrediting any research or evidence that human-induced climate change is happening, much of it underwritten by big energy companies. These are what might be described as the ‘in-your-face conformists’ – this group has a number of special interests in maintaining the current status quo.

Second, and perhaps more problematic than the ‘in-your-face conformists’, are all those who acknowledge climate change is happening, but do not have the political capital or will to do anything about it except at the level of rhetoric. Some of the actions of this ‘stealth conformists’ group may be as damaging as anything done by the outright deniers. Without sufficient courage and will among these groups, the ratification of any agreement from COP 15 will simply be dragged out for as long as possible. Once ratified, the likelihood is the same thing will happen to the implementation of the agreement.

The danger is that without sufficient movement from those within the ‘conformist-by-stealth’ groups, we could well find ourselves caught up in a global version of the “conformity + change = collapse” equation.

The stakes are as high as they get, and are not limited to climate change and its implications, however large-scale those implications turn out to be. As Connie Hedegaard, Danish Minister for Climate and Energy and incoming COP15 president puts it:

If the whole world comes to Copenhagen and leaves without making the needed political agreement, then I think it’s a failure that is not just about climate. Then it’s the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century.” (emphasis added)

From The Economist:

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