Browsing by Author "Janssen, Marco A."

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A Computational Text Analysis Approach to Investigating Public Discourse and Participation in the Case of the 2022 Arizona Legislative Study Committee on Housing
(2024) Castille, Eve L.; Janssen, Marco A.
There is increasing interest in participatory processes as a means to deal with complexity in governance challenges. It is thought to improve decision-making and outcomes by incorporating diverse values and knowledge and generating creative solutions through dialogue and deliberation. Who communicates, who has decision-making authority, and in what context the communication occurs shape the participants, the institutions they create, and the interactions they have within social-ecological systems? We build on the growing public discourse scholarship field to demonstrate how who communicates and who has decision-making authority shapes the institutions that are created. We demonstrate how computational text analysis methods may be used to investigate public discourse. Our study is the first application of these methods to public discourse of which we are aware.
Addressing Global Sustainability Challenges from the Bottom Up: The Role of Information Feedback
(2012) Janssen, Marco A.; Hohman, Nicholas
"Global sustainable use of natural resources confronts our society as a collective action problem at an unprecedented scale. Past research has provided insights into the attributes of local social-ecological systems that enable eective self-governance. In this note we discuss possible mechanisms to scale up those community level insights to a larger scale. We do this by combining insights from social-psychology on the role of information feedback with the increasing availability of information technology. By making use of tailored social feedback to individuals in social networks we may be able to scale up the strengths of self-governance at the community level to address global sustainability challenges from the bottom up."
Advancing the Understanding of Behavior in Social-Ecological Systems: Results from Lab and Field Experiments
(2015) Janssen, Marco A.; Lindahl, Therese; Murphy, James J.
"Experiments have made important contributions to our understanding of human behavior, including behavior relevant for understanding social-ecological systems. When there is a conflict between individual and group interests in social-ecological systems, social dilemmas occur. From the many types of social-dilemma formulations that are used to study collective action, common-pool resource and public-good dilemmas are most relevant for social-ecological systems. Experimental studies of both common-pool resource and public-good dilemmas have shown that many predictions based on the conventional theory of collective action, which assumes rational, self-interested behavior, do not hold. More cooperation occurs than predicted, 'cheap talk' increases cooperation, and participants are willing to invest in sanctioning free riders. Experiments have also demonstrated a diversity of motivations, which affect individual decisions about cooperation and sanctioning."
An Agent-based Model Based on Field Experiments
(2012) Janssen, Marco A.
"This chapter describes the empirical calibration of a theoretical model based on data from field experiments. Field experiments on irrigation dilemmas were performed to understand how resource users overcome asymmetric collective action problems. The fundamental problem facing irrigation systems is how to solve two related collective action problems: 1) the provision of the physical and ecological infrastructure necessary to utilize the resource (water), and 2) the irrigation dilemma where the relative positions of 'head-enders' and 'tail-enders' generate a sequential access to the resource itself (water). If the actors behave as rational, self-interested agents, it is difficult to understand how irrigation infrastructure could ever be constructed and maintained by the farmers who utilize the system as opposed to a government irrigation bureaucracy. Wittfogel (1957) argued that a centralized control was indispensable for the functioning of larger irrigation systems and hypothesized that some state-level societies have emerged as a necessary side-effect of solving problems associated with the use of large-scale irrigation."
Asymmetric Commons Games in the Laboratory and the Field
(2009) Janssen, Marco A.; Anderies, John M.; Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo
"The emergence of large-scale irrigation systems has puzzled generations of social scientists. Given the challenges of both coordinating activities in a complex network of social interactions and providing public infrastructure, the number of irrigation systems that have evolved without central coordination and have persisted so long is astonishing. Specifically, irrigation systems seem to be vulnerable to selfish rational actors that exploit inherent asymmetries such as simply being the headender or who free ride on the public infrastructure. In this paper we will discuss laboratory and field experiments that address the problem of self-governance in an asymmetric commons dilemma. Laboratory experiments have been performed at Arizona State University, and field experiments have been performed in rural villages in Thailand and Colombia. We formulate an abstract dilemma where participants make both a decision about investment in public infrastructure and how much to extract from the resources generated by that public infrastructure. The impact of inherent asymmetry in irrigation systems on the provision of a public common resource the importance of fairness to generate long term efficiency will be discussed."
The Battle of Perspectives: A Multi-Agent Model with Adaptive Responses to Climate Change
(1998) Janssen, Marco A.; de Vries, Bert
"To evaluate possible futures with regard to economy, energy and climate, a multi-agent modelling approach is used. Agents hold different perspectives on how the world functions (world view) and how it should be managed (management style) and this is implemented in a simple dynamic model of the economy-energy-climate system. Each perspective is supported by a proportion of the agents, but this proportion changes in response to observations about the real world. In this way the totality of agents learn from their observations. It is concluded that this approach is a good illustration of how adaptive behavior can be included in global change modelling. Some exploratory experiments are done to address the consequences of surprises."
Bottom Up Solutions for Global Change
(2012) Janssen, Marco A.
"A sustainable future requires a change of human activities at a global scale. Global agreements have not been very effective. At the local level there are many examples of successful efforts to solve collective action problems within social-ecological systems. The study of these examples has led to an understanding of the principles of self-governance. We propose to scale up these insights of self-governance using social media tools to address global change challenges."
Breaking the Elected Rules in a Field Experiment on Forestry Resources
(2012) Janssen, Marco A.; Bousquet, François; Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo; Castillo, Daniel; Worrapimphong, Kobchai
"Harvesting from common resources has been studied through experimental work in the laboratory and in the field. In this paper we report on a dynamic commons experiment, representing a forest, performed with different types of communities of resource users in Thailand and Colombia, as well as student participants. We find that all groups overharvest the resource in the first part of the experiment and that there is no statistical difference between the various types of groups. In the second part of the experiment, participants appropriate the common resource after one of three possible regulations is elected and implemented. There is less overharvesting after the rules are implemented, but there is a significant amount of rule breaking. The surprising finding is that Colombian villagers break the rules of the games more often than other groups, and even more so when they have more trust in members of the community. This observation can be explained by the distrust in externally proposed regulations due to the institutional and cultural context."
Challenges and Opportunities in Coding the Commons: Problems, Procedures, and Potential Solutions in Large-N Comparative Case Studies
(2015) Ratajczyk, Elicia; Ute, Brady; Baggio, Jacopo A.; Barnett, Allain J.; Pèrez-Ibarra, Irene; Rollins, Nathan; Rubiños, Cathy A.; Shin, Hoon C.; Yu, David J.; Aggarwal, Rimjhim; Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.
"On-going efforts to understand the dynamics of coupled social-ecological (or more broadly, coupled infrastructure) systems and common pool resources have led to the generation of numerous datasets based on a large number of case studies. This data has facilitated the identification of important factors and fundamental principles which increase our understanding of such complex systems. However, the data at our disposal are often not easily comparable, have limited scope and scale, and are based on disparate underlying frameworks inhibiting synthesis, meta-analysis, and the validation of findings. Research efforts are further hampered when case inclusion criteria, variable definitions, coding schema, and inter-coder reliability testing are not made explicit in the presentation of research and shared among the research community. This paper first outlines challenges experienced by researchers engaged in a large-scale coding project; then highlights valuable lessons learned in large-scale coding projects; and finally discusses opportunities for further research on comparative case study analysis focusing on social-ecological systems and common pool resources."
Conditional Behavior Affects the Level of Evolved Cooperation in Public Good Games
(2013) Janssen, Marco A.; Manning, Miles; Udiani, Oyita
"Human societies are unique in the level of cooperation among non-kin. Evolutionary models explaining this behavior typically assume pure strategies of cooperation and defection. Behavioral experiments, however, demonstrate that humans are typically conditional co-operators who have other-regarding preferences. Building on existing models on the evolution of cooperation and costly punishment, we use a utilitarian formulation of agent decision making to explore conditions that support the emergence of cooperative behavior. Our results indicate that cooperation levels are significantly lower for larger groups in contrast to the original pure strategy model. Here, defection behavior not only diminishes the public good, but also affects the expectations of group members leading conditional co-operators to change their strategies. Hence defection has a more damaging effect when decisions are based on expectations and not only pure strategies."
Cooperation in Asymmetric Commons Dilemmas
(2012) Pérez, Irene; Baggio, Jacopo A.; Rollins, Nathan D.; Janssen, Marco A.
"This paper is a study of collective action in asymmetric access to a common resource. An example is an irrigation system with upstream and downstream resource users. While both contribute to the maintenance of the common infrastructure, the upstream participant has rst access to the resource. Results of our two-player asymmetric commons game show that privileged resource access player invest more than the downstream players. Investments by the downstream player into the common resource are rewarded by a higher share from the common resource by the upstream player. Decisions are mainly explained by the levels of trust and trustworthiness. Introducing uncertainty in the production function of the common resource did not aect the results in a significant way."
Coordination and Cooperation in Asymmetric Commons Dilemmas
(2008) Janssen, Marco A.; Anderies, John M.; Joshi, Sanket R.
"In this paper we discuss laboratory experiments that address the problem of self-governance in an asymmetric commons dilemma. Small-scale irrigation systems that provide food for hundreds of millions of people around the world are probable the most common example of such dilemmas. Here, we formulate an abstract dilemma in which subjects make both a decision about investment in the provision of infrastructure associated with the use of a resource and about how much to extract from the common-pool resource made available by this infrastructure. The impact of inherent asymmetry in irrigation systems on the provision of a resource and the impact of communication on the capacity of the group to solve the two-level commons dilemma of cooperation and coordination based on the analysis of the experimental data are discussed."
Coordination in Irrigation Systems: An Analysis of the Lansing-Kremer Model of Bali
(2007) Janssen, Marco A.
"Farmers within irrigation systems, such as those in Bali, solve complex coordination problems to allocate water and control pests. Lansing and Kremer's [Lansing, J.S., Kremer, J.N., 1993. Emergent properties of Balinese water temples. American Anthropologist 95(1), 97-114] study of Balinese water temples showed that this coordination problem can be solved by assuming simple local rules for how individual communities make their decisions. Using the original Lansing-Kremer model, the robustness of their insights was analyzed and the ability of agents to self-organize was found to be sensitive to pest dynamics and assumptions of agent decision making."
Design Principles for Robustness of Institutions in Social-Ecological Systems
(2003) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"What makes social-ecological systems robust? In this paper we look at the institutional configuration that affect the interactions between resource, resource users, public infrastructure providers and public infrastructure. The framework we propose helps us to identify potential vulnerable parts of a social-ecological system to internal disturbances. Especially the tensions between resource users and public infrastructure providers are key in potential robustness of the social-ecological system. Design principles originally developed for robust common-pool resource institutions seem to be a good starting point for the development of design principles for more general social-ecological systems."
Diffusion Dynamics in Small-World Networks with Heterogeneous Consumers
(2005) Delre, Sebastiano A.; Jager, Wander; Janssen, Marco A.
"Diffusions of new products and technologies through social networks can be formalized as spreading of infectious diseases. However, while epidemiological models describe infection in terms of transmissibility and susceptibility, we propose a diffusion model that explicitly includes consumer decision-making affected by social influences and word-of-mouth processes. In our computational model consumers' probability of adoption depends on the external marketing effort and on the internal influence that each consumer perceives in his/her personal social networks. Maintaining a given marketing effort and assuming its effect on the probability of adoption as linear, we can study how the speed of the diffusion depends on the network structure and on consumer heterogeneity. First, we show that the speed of diffusion changes with the degree of randomness in the network. The speed is low in regular networks, it increases in small-world networks and finally it becomes low again in random networks. Second, we show that heterogeneity helps the diffusion. Alteris paribus and varying the degree of heterogeneity in the population of agents results show that the more heterogeneous the population, the faster the speed of the diffusion. These results contribute to marketing strategies for the launch and the dissemination of new products and technologies."
Dynamics of Rules and Resources: Three New Field Experiments on Water, Forests and Fisheries
(2008) Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo; Janssen, Marco A.; Bousquet, François
"Most common-pool resource experiments, inspired by the ground-breaking work of Ostrom, Gardner and Walker (1994), involve a typical structure of a static non-linear social dilemma with a rival but nonexcludable good that is extracted by a number of players. However there are specific ecological features of relevant common-pool resources that can be incorporated into an experimental design and tested in the field or the lab. Stock effects, spatial effects or vertical downstream externalities are issues that natural scientists and economists have studied in forests, fisheries or watershed management although experimental works on these ecological aspects are rather scarce. We designed three resource specific games to capture particular characteristics of common-pool resources and apply them in six villages in Thailand and Colombia. In each village we recruited 60 people and conducted three games. A water irrigation game capturing the downstream externalities and collective action problem of provision and appropriation stages where all players need to contribute to a public project that produces water which is then extracted sequentially by each of the players starting with the one located upstream, leaving the remaining water to the next player downstream, and so on. In our forestry game players start with a number of standing trees that can be cut by any of the players; in any round each player can extract between zero and a fixed number of trees. The remaining trees regrow at a certain rate and the resulting trees are then left for the next round for individual extraction. The game ends at a maximum number of rounds or when no trees are left. Finally, the fisheries game involves two possible fishing sites that can have high or low levels of stock. Each player needs to decide where to fish between the two sites and her individual effort of fishing. Depending on the aggregate level of fishing effort in each site, the stock level will change for the following round and will determine the fishing returns. All games involve a social dilemma where individual interests clash with the socially optimal outcome. Lessons can be derived regarding the design of better resource management rules and a better understanding of how resource specific dynamics affect the social dilemmas in commonpool resources."
Ecology, Ethics, and Advocacy
(1997) Peterson, Garry D.; Pope, Shealagh E.; De Leo, Giulio Alessandro; Janssen, Marco A.; Malcolm, Jay R.; Parody, Jennifer M.; Hood, Greg; North, Malcolm
"Anthropogenic global change is radically altering climate, mineral cycles, land cover, and biotic communities (Turner et al. 1993, Vitousek 1994). These changes ensure that everywhere on Earth is affected by human actions. In some areas, such as the center of large cities, human transformation is near absolute, whereas in other places, such as remote parks, human influence is felt chiefly through the alteration of global cycles. However, no place is free from multiple, confounded human impacts. Consequently, ecological studies, whether they attend to or not, are partially studying the impact of anthropogenic change. "Ecologists cannot ignore these changes. First, ignoring these changes will produce flawed science; if ecologists ignore anthropogenic influences, they will probably attribute change to the wrong processes. Second, and perhaps more important, if ecologists want to guide or 'engineer' the human transformation of the earth to reduce unintended consequences, they need to understand how ecosystems organize and function in response to a huge variety of anthropogenic alterations. "Engineering ecological systems is dangerous. Nature is neither predictable nor inert; rather it is evolutionary and self-modifying. History, evolution, and variation are all central to ecology, but foreign to the 'memory-less,' repeatable, and variation-minimizing methods of traditional engineering. "Ecologists cannot hide behind 'pure' science and divorce themselves from the dangerous application of ecology. Whether ecologists like it or not, managers, policy makers, and the general public use ecological theory, or at least their understanding of ecological theory, to make decisions. To promote 'reflective' management and sound science, ecologists need to study, criticize, and inform the human transformation of nature."
The Effect of Information in a Behavioral Irrigation Experiment
(2015) Janssen, Marco A.; Anderies, John M.; Pérez, Irene; Yu, David J.
"When governing shared resources, the level and quality of information available to resource users on the actions of others and the state of the environment may have a critical effect on the performance of groups. In the work presented here, we nd that lower availability of information does not affect the average performance of the group in terms of their capacity to provide public infrastructure and govern resource use, but it affects the distribution of earnings and the ability to cope with disturbances. We performed behavioral experiments that mimic irrigation dilemmas in which participants need to maintain infrastructure function in order to generate revenue from the use of water. In the experimental design, there is an upstream-downstream asymmetry of access to water that may lead to unequal access to water. We find that inequality of investment in irrigation infrastructure and water appropriation across players is more pronounced in experiments where resource users have limited information about the actions of others. We also find that inequality is linked to the ability of groups to cope with disturbances. Hence a reduced level of information indirectly reduces the adaptive capacity of groups."
Effect of Rule Choice in Dynamic Interactive Spatial Commons
(2008) Janssen, Marco A.; Goldstone, Robert L.; Menczer, Filippo; Ostrom, Elinor
"This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine the effect of an endogenous rule change from open access to private property as a potential solution to overharvesting in commons dilemmas. A novel, spatial, real-time renewable resource environment was used to investigate whether participants were willing to invest in changing the rules from an open access situation to a private property system. We found that half of the participants invested in creating private property arrangements. Groups who had experienced private property in the second round of the experiment, made different decisions in the third round when open access was reinstituted in contrast to groups who experienced three rounds of open access. At the group level, earnings increased in Round 3, but this was at a cost of more inequality. No significant differences in outcomes occurred between experiments where rules were imposed by the experimental design or chosen by participants."
Empirically Based, Agent-based Models
(2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"There is an increasing drive to combine agent-based models with empirical methods. An overview is provided of the various empirical methods that are used for different kinds of questions. Four categories of empirical approaches are identified in which agent-based models have been empirically tested: case studies, stylized facts, role-playing games, and laboratory experiments. We discuss how these different types of empirical studies can be combined. The various ways empirical techniques are used illustrate the main challenges of contemporary social sciences: (1) how to develop models that are generalizable and still applicable in specific cases, and (2) how to scale up the processes of interactions of a few agents to interactions among many agents."
Environmental Variability and Collective Action: Experimental Insights from an Irrigation Game
(2012) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.; Lee, Allen; Wasserman, Hannah
"Studies of collective action in commons dilemmas in social-ecological systems typically focus on scenarios in which actors all share symmetric (or similar) positions in relation to the common-pool resource. Many common social-ecological systems do not meet these criteria, most notably, irrigation systems. Participants in irrigation systems must solve two related collective action problems: 1) the provisioning of physical infrastructure necessary to utilize the resource (water), and 2) the asymmetric common-pool resource dilemma where the relative positions of 'head-enders' and 'tail-enders' generate asymmetric access to the resource itself (water). In times of scarcity, head-enders have an incentive to not share water with tail-enders. Likewise, tail-enders have an incentive to not provide labor to maintain the system if they do not receive water. These interdependent incentives may induce a cooperative outcome under favorable conditions. However, how robust is this system of interdependent incentives in the presence of environmental variability that generates uncertainty about water availability either through variation in the water supply itself or through shocks to infrastructure? This paper reports on results from laboratory experiments designed to address this question."
Evolution of Institutional Rules: An Immune System Perspective
(2005) Janssen, Marco A.
"This article discusses the evolution of institutional rules, the prescriptions that humans use to shape their collective activities. Four aspects of the rules are discussed: coding, creation, selection, and memory. The immune system provides us a useful metaphor to relate these four aspects into a coherent framework. For each aspect, the relevant dynamics in social systems and immune systems are discussed. Finally, a framework for a computational model to study the evolution of rules is sketched."
Experimental Platforms for Behavioral Experiments on Social- Ecological Systems
(2014) Janssen, Marco A.; Lee, Alan; Waring, Tim
"Recently, there has been an increased interest in using behavioral experiments to study hypotheses on the governance of social-ecological systems. A diversity of software tools are used to implement such experiments. We evaluated various publicly available platforms that could be used in research and education on the governance of social-ecological systems. The aims of the various platforms are distinct, and this is noticeable in the differences in their user-friendliness and their adaptability to novel research questions. The more easily accessible platforms are useful for prototyping experiments and for educational purposes to illustrate theoretical concepts. To advance novel research aims, more elaborate programming experience is required to either implement an experiment from scratch or adjust existing experimental software. There is no ideal platform best suited for all possible use cases, but we have provided a menu of options and their associated trade-offs."
Experimental Platforms for Behavioral Experiments on Social-Ecological Systems
(2014) Janssen, Marco A.; Lee, Allen; Waring, Tim; Galafassi, Diego
"Recently, there has been an increased interest in using behavioral experiments to study hypotheses on the governance of social-ecological experiments. A diversity of software tools are used to implement such experiments. In this paper we evaluate various publicly available platforms that could be used in research and education on the governance of social-ecological systems. The aims of the various platforms are distinct and this is noticeable in the differences in their user-friendliness and their adaptability to novel research questions. The more easily accessible platforms are useful for proto-typing experiments and for educational purposes to illustrate theoretical concepts. In order to advance novel research aims more elaborate programming experience is required to either implement an experiment from scratch or adjust existing experiment software. There is no ideal platform best suited for all possible use cases but we provide a menu of options and their associated tradeoffs."
Explaining Success and Failure in the Commons: The Configural Nature of Ostrom's Institutional Design Principles
(2016) Baggio, Jacopo Alessandro; Barnett, Allain T.; Pèrez-Ibarra, Irene; Brady, Ute; Ratajczyk, Elicia; Rollins, Nathan; Rubiños, Cathy; Shin, Hoon C.; Yu, David J.; Aggarwal, Rimjhim; Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.
"Governing common pool resources (CPR) in the face of disturbances such as globalization and climate change is challenging. The outcome of any CPR governance regime is the influenced by local combinations of social, institutional, and biophysical factors, as well as cross-scale interdependencies. In this study, we take a step towards understanding multiple-causation of CPR outcomes by analyzing 1) the co-occurrence of Destign Principles (DP) by activity (irrigation, fishery and forestry), and 2) the combination(s) of DPs leading to social and ecological success. We analyzed 69 cases pertaining to three different activities: irrigation, fishery, and forestry. We find that the importance of the design principles is dependent upon the natural and hard human made infrastructure (i.e. canals, equipment, vessels etc.). For example, clearly defined social bounduaries are important when the natural infrastructure is highly mobile (i.e. tuna fish), while monitoring is more important when the natural infrastructure is more static (i.e. forests or water contained within an irrigation system). However, we also find that congruence between local conditions and rules and proportionality between investment and extraction are key for CPR success independent from the natural and human hard made infrastructure. We further provide new visualization techniques for co-occurrence patterns and add to qualitative comparative analysis by introducing a reliability metric to deal with a large meta-analysis dataset on secondary data where information is missing or uncertain."
Fashions, Habits and Changing Preferences: Simulation of Psychological Factors Affecting Market Dynamics
(2007) Janssen, Marco A.; Jager, Wander
"Markets can show different types of dynamics, from quiet markets dominated by one or few products, to markets with constant penetration of new and reintroduced products. This paper explores the dynamics of markets from a psychological perspective using a multi-agent simulation model. The behavioural rules of the artificial consumers, the consumats, are based on a conceptual meta-theory from psychology. The artificial consumers have to choose each period between similar products. Products remain in the market as long as they maintain a minimum level of market share, else they will be replaced by a new product. Assuming a population of consumats with different preferences, and social networks, the model simulates adoption of new products for alternative assumptions on behavioural rules. Furthermore, the consequences of changing preferences and the size of social networks are explored. Results show that the behavioural rules that dominate the artificial consumer's decision making determine the resulting market dynamics, such as fashions, lock-in and unstable renewal. Results also show the importance of psychological variables like social networks, preferences and the need for identity to explain the dynamics of markets."
Framework to Analyze the Robustness of Social-ecological Systems from an Institutional Perspective
(2004) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"What makes social-ecological systems (SESs) robust? In this paper, we look at the institutional configurations that affect the interactions among resources, resource users, public infrastructure providers, and public infrastructures. We propose a framework that helps identify potential vulnerabilities of SESs to disturbances. All the links between components of this framework can fail and thereby reduce the robustness of the system. We posit that the link between resource users and public infrastructure providers is a key variable affecting the robustness of SESs that has frequently been ignored in the past. We illustrate the problems caused by a disruption in this link. We then briefly describe the design principles originally developed for robust common-pool resource institutions, because they appear to be a good starting point for the development of design principles for more general SESs and do include the link between resource users and public infrastructure providers."
Framework to Analyze the Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems from an Institutional Perspective
(2004) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor
"What makes social-ecological systems robust? In this paper we look at the institutional configurations that affect the interactions among resources, resource users, public infrastructure providers, and public infrastructures. We propose a framework that helps to identify potential vulnerabilities of social-ecological systems to disturbances. All of the linkages among the components of this framework can fail and thereby reduce the robustness of the system. We posit that the link between resource users and public infrastructure providers are a key variable affecting the robustness of social-ecological systems that has frequently been ignored in the past. We illustrate the problems caused by a disruption in this link. We then briefly describe the design principles originally developed for robust common-pool resource institutions since they appear to be a good starting point for the development of design principles for more general social-ecological systems and do include the link between resource users and public infrastructure providers."
Games for Groundwater Governance: Field Experiments in Andhra Pradesh, India
(2014) Mienzen-Dick, Ruth; Chaturvedi, Rahul; Domènech, Laia; Ghate, Rucha; Janssen, Marco A.; Rollins, Nathan; Sandeep, K.
"Groundwater is a common pool resource which experience depletion in many places around the world. The increased use of irrigation and water demanding cash crops stimulate this development. We present results of eld experiments on groundwater dilemmas performed in hard rock areas of Andhra Pradesh, India. Two NGOs (Foundation for Ecological Security and Jana Jagriti) ran the games in communities in which they were working to improve watershed and water management. Games were played with groups of ve men or ve women, followed by a community debrieng. Results indicate that longer time of NGO involvement in the village was associated with more cooperative outcomes in the games. Individuals with more education and with higher perceived social capital played more cooperatively, but neither gender nor method of payment had a signicantly eect on individual behavior. When participants could repeat the game with communication, similar crop choice patterns were observed. The games provided an entry point for discussion on the understanding of communities of the interconnectedness of groundwater use and crops choice."
Governing Social-Ecological Systems
(Elsevier, 2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Ostrom, Elinor; Tesfatsion, L.; Judd, K.L.
"Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems where social and biophysical agents are interacting at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The main challenge for the study of governance of social-ecological systems is improving our understanding of the conditions under which cooperative solutions are sustained, how social actors can make robust decisions in the face of uncertainty and how the topology of interactions between social and biophysical actors affect governance. We review the contributions of agent-based modeling to these challenges for theoretical studies, studies which combines models with laboratory experiments and applications of practical case studies. "Empirical studies from laboratory experiments and field work have challenged the predictions of the conventional model of the selfish rational agent for common pool resources and public-good games. Agent-based models have been used to test alternative models of decision-making which are more in line with the empirical record. Those models include bounded rationality, other regarding preferences and heterogeneity among the attributes of agents. Uncertainty and incomplete knowledge are directly related to the study of governance of social-ecological systems. Agent-based models have been developed to explore the consequences of incomplete knowledge and to identify adaptive responses that limited the undesirable consequences of uncertainties. Finally, the studies on the topology of agent interactions mainly focus on land use change, in which models of decision-making are combined with geographical information systems. "Conventional approaches in environmental economics do not explicitly include nonconvex dynamics of ecosystems, non-random interactions of agents, incomplete understanding, and empirically based models of behavior in collective action. Although agent-based modeling for social-ecological systems is in its infancy, it addresses the above features explicitly and is therefore potentially useful to address the current challenges in the study of governance of social-ecological systems."
An Immune System Perspective on Ecosystem Management
(2001) Janssen, Marco A.
"A new perspective for studying the complex interactions between human activities and ecosystems is proposed. It is argued that biological immune systems share a number of similarities with ecological economic systems in terms of function. These similarities include the system's ability to recognize harmful invasions, design measures to control and destroy these invasions, and remember successful response strategies. Studying both the similarities and the differences between immune systems and ecological economic systems can provide new insights on ecosystem management."
Institutions and the Performance of Coupled Infrastructure Systems
(2016) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.; Schlager, Edella
"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."
Introducing Ecological Dynamics into Common-Pool Resource Experiments
(2010) Janssen, Marco A.
"Case-study analysis shows that long-lasting social–ecological systems have institutional arrangements regulating where, when, and how to appropriate resources instead of how much. Those cases testify to the importance of the fit between ecological and institutional dynamics. Experiments are increasingly used to study decision making, test alternative behavioral models, and test policies. In typical commons dilemma experiments, the only possible decision is how much to appropriate. Therefore, conventional experiments restrict the option to study the interplay between ecological and institutional dynamics. Using a new real-time, spatial, renewable resource environment, we can study the informal norms that participants develop in an experimental resource dilemma setting. Do ecological dynamics affect the institutional arrangements they develop? We find that the informal institutions developed on when, where, and how to appropriate the resource vary with the ecological dynamics in the different treatments. Finally, we find that the amount and distribution of communication messages and not the content of the communication explains the differences between group performances."
An Iterative Approach to Case Study Analysis: Insights from Qualitative Analysis of Quantitative Inconsistencies
(2016) Barnett, Allain T.; Baggio, Jacopo Alessandro; Shin, Hoon C.; Yu, David J.; Pèrez-Ibarra, Irene; Rubiños, Cathy; Brady, Ute; Ratajczyk, Elicia; Rollins, Nathan; Aggarwal, Rimjhim; Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.
"Large-N comparative studies have helped common pool resource scholars gain general insights into the factors that influence collective action and governance outcomes. However, these studies are often limited by missing data, and suffer from the methodological limitation that important information is lost when we reduce textual information to quantitative data. This study was motivated by nine case studies that appeared to be inconsistent with the expectation that the presence of Ostrom’s Design Principles increases the likelihood of successful common pool resource governance. These cases highlight the limitations of coding and analysing Large-N case studies. We examine two issues: 1) the challenge of missing data and 2) potential approaches that rely on context (which is often lost in the coding process) to address inconsistencies between empirical observations theoretical predictions. For the latter, we conduct a post-hoc qualitative analysis of a large-N comparative study to explore 2 types of inconsistencies: 1) cases where evidence for nearly all design principles was found, but available evidence led to the assessment that the CPR system was unsuccessful and 2) cases where the CPR system was deemed successful despite finding limited or no evidence for design principles. We describe inherent challenges to large-N comparative analysis to coding complex and dynamically changing common pool resource systems for the presence or absence of design principles and the determination of 'success'. Finally, we illustrate how, in some cases, our qualitative analysis revealed that the identity of absent design principles explained inconsistencies hence de-facto reconciling such apparent inconsistencies with theoretical predictions. This analysis demonstrates the value of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, and using mixed-methods approaches iteratively to build comprehensive methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding common pool resource governance in a dynamically changing context."
Lab Experiments on Irrigation Games Under Uncertainty
(2014) Rollins, Nathan D.; Baggio, Jacopo A.; Perez, Irene; Janssen, Marco A.
"Research on collective action and common pool resources is extensive. However, little work has concentrated on the effect of uncertainty in resource availability and collective action, especially in the context of asymmetric access to resources. Earlier works have demonstrated that uncertainty often leads to a reduction of collective action in the governance of shared resources. Here we assess how uncertainty in the resource availability may impact collective action. We perform a behavioral experiment of an irrigation dilemma. In this dilemma participants invest first into a public fund that generates water resources for the group, which is subsequently appropriated one participant at the time from head-end to tail-end. The amount of resource generated for the given investment level is determined by a payo table and a stochastic event representing rainfall. Results show that access asymmetry and resulting inequalities dominate any effects from uncertainty about the resource condition. The strategic uncertainty about the decisions of other players dominates potential effects from the environmental uncertainty."
Learning to Play Nice: Strategy Evolution in the National Hockey League
(2005) Ahn, Toh-Kyeong; Janssen, Marco A.; Reiners, Derek; Stake, Jeffrey E.
"The effect of increased monitoring and rule-enforcement in National Hockey League(NHL) games is analyzed at two levels (player and team). The economic theory of crime predicts a reduction of rule breaking due to increased deterrence. No change is observed in behavior at the player level. At the team level, however, we find a change in composition in type of players. Private rule enforcers, the goons, become more costly and less necessary when official monitoring is increased. We observe a decrease in the salaries of the goons as our game theoretic model predicted. These findings suggest that the economic theory of crime needs to be tested at multiple temporal and organizational levels."
Learning, Signaling, and Social Preferences in Public-Good Games
(2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Ahn, Toh-Kyeong
"This study compares the empirical performance of a variety of learning models and theories of social preferences in the context of experimental games involving the provision of public goods. Parameters are estimated via maximum likelihood estimation. We also performed estimations to identify different types of agents and distributions of parameters. The estimated models suggest that the players of such games take into account the learning of others and are belief learners. Despite these interesting findings, we conclude that a powerful method of model selection of agent-based models on dynamic social dilemma experiments is still lacking."
Mobility, Resource Harvesting and Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems
(2012) Ibarra, Irene Perez; Janssen, Marco A.
"Globalization is an important feature aecting the robustness of small-scale social-ecological systems (SESs). Understanding the way globalization aects those systems is crucial for adaptation. In this paper we focus on analyzing how the increased displacement of resource users as a consequence of globalization aects the robustness of SESs. We developed a stylized agent-based model representing a dynamic population of agents moving and harvesting a renewable resource. The individual characteristics and behavior of agents and governments determine the robustness or collapse of the system. We analyzed several scenarios in which we vary the mobility of the agents (i.e., the extent to which agents can move), the distribution of the resource richness and the amount of information governments have regarding potential intruders. Our results showed that agent mobility signicantly affects the robustness of the SES. This response is non linear and very sensible to the type of spatial distribution of the resource richness. The attractiveness of rich resource sites (local level) to agents makes them vulnerable to rapid collapse with consequences to the global system. While medium heterogeneous landscapes are very robust to mobility, highly heterogeneous landscapes (i.e., exponential distribution of resource richness) are not able to absorb such a disturbance; the system stability as well as the resource and occupation levels drop as mobility increases. An increase in enforcement is not sucient for the robustness of such SESs. Results suggest the importance of global governance to deal with governance of resource rich areas, not only for local governments because those areas are more prone to invasions but for global sustainability itself."
Modelling Malaria as a Complex Adaptive System
(1997) Janssen, Marco A.; Martens, W.J.M.
"As the resistance of the malaria parasite to antimalarial drugs continues to increase, as does that of the malarial mosquito to insecticides, the efficacy of efforts to control malaria in many tropical countries is diminishing. This trend, together with the projected consequences of climate change, may prove to exacerbate substantially the significance of malaria in the coming decades. "In this article we introduce the use of an evolutionary modeling approach to simulate the adaptation of mosquitoes and parasites to the available pesticides and drugs. By coupling genetic algorithms with a dynamic malaria-epidemiological model, we derive a complex adaptive system capable of simulating adapting and evolving processes within both the mosquito and the parasite populations. "This approach is used to analyze malaria management strategies appropriate to regions of higher and lower degrees of endemicity. The results suggest that adequate use of insecticides and drugs may reduce the occurrence of malaria in regions of low endemicity, although increased efforts would be necessary in the event of a climate change. However, our model indicates that in regions of high endemicity the use of insecticides and drugs may lead to an increase in incidence due to enhanced resistance development. Projected climate change, on the other hand, may lead to a limited reduction of the occurrence of malaria due to the presence of a higher percentage of immune persons in the older age class."
A Multi-Method Approach to Study Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems: The Case of Small-Scale Irrigation Systems
(2013) Janssen, Marco A.; Anderies, John M.
"Elinor Ostrom was a leader in using multiple methods to perform institutional analysis. In this paper we discuss how a multi-method approach she pioneered may be used to study the robustness of social-ecological systems. We synthesize lessons learned from a series of studies on small-scale irrigation systems in which we use comparative case study analysis, experimental methods in lab and field settings, and mathematical models. The accumulated insights show the importance of creating institutional arrangements that t the human ecology within the biophysical constraints of the system. Critical for success is the ability to maintain trust relationships, low levels of inequality and low transaction costs of coordination. Those systems that can leverage biophysical characteristics to help address challenges of monitoring, sanctioning, and coordination have an even higher chance of success."
A Multilevel Evolutionary Framework for Sustainability Analysis
(2015) Waring, Timothy M.; Kline, Michelle Ann; Brooks, Jeremy S.; Goff, Sandra H.; Gowdy, John; Janssen, Marco A.; Smaldino, Paul E.; Jacquet, Jennifer
"Sustainability theory can help achieve desirable social-ecological states by generalizing lessons across contexts and improving the design of sustainability interventions. To accomplish these goals, we argue that theory in sustainability science must (1) explain the emergence and persistence of social-ecological states, (2) account for endogenous cultural change, (3) incorporate cooperation dynamics, and (4) address the complexities of multilevel social-ecological interactions. We suggest that cultural evolutionary theory broadly, and cultural multilevel selection in particular, can improve on these fronts. We outline a multilevel evolutionary framework for describing social-ecological change and detail how multilevel cooperative dynamics can determine outcomes in environmental dilemmas. We show how this framework complements existing sustainability frameworks with a description of the emergence and persistence of sustainable institutions and behavior, a means to generalize causal patterns across social-ecological contexts, and a heuristic for designing and evaluating effective sustainability interventions. We support these assertions with case examples from developed and developing countries in which we track cooperative change at multiple levels of social organization as they impact social-ecological outcomes. Finally, we make suggestions for further theoretical development, empirical testing, and application."
A Multimethod Approach to Study the Governance of Social-Ecological Systems
(2011) Janssen, Marco A.; Bousquet, François; Ostrom, Elinor
"In this paper, we discuss the lessons learned from a project that combined different types of methods to study the interaction of ecological dynamics, experience of resource users, and institutional arrangements.We combined theoretical computational models, laboratory experiments with undergraduate students in the USA, field experiments, and role games with villagers in rural Thailand and Colombia. The expectation at the start of the project was that specific experience with resource management would affect the way participants play the game and the rules they would develop. We found that contextual variables, such as trust in other community members and the feeling of being an accepted member of the community, and also the ecological context had significant explanatory power, more than experience. Another conclusion from using these different methods is the fact that the quality of resource management lies more on the possibility of communication rather than on the types of rules crafted or selected."
Overexploitation of Renewable Resources by Ancient Societies and the Role of Sunk-Cost Effects
(2004) Janssen, Marco A.; Scheffer, Marten
"One of the most persistent mysteries in the history of humankind is the collapse of ancient societies. It is puzzling that societies that achieved such high levels of development disappeared so suddenly. It has been argued that overexploitation of environmental resources played a role in the collapse of such societies. In this paper, we propose an explanation why overexploitation seems more common in ancient societies that built larger structures. This explanation is based on the well-studied sunk-cost effect in human decision making: decisions are often based on past investments rather than expected future returns. This leads to an unwillingness to abandon something (e. g., a settlement) if a great deal has been invested in it, even if future prospects are dim. Empirical study suggests that there are indications of sunk-cost effects in the histories of several ancient societies. A stylized model is used to illustrate under which conditions societal collapse may be expected. Finally, we discuss the consequences of these insights for current societies."
Pastoralists' Responses to Variation of Rangeland Resource in Time and Space
(2006) McAllister, Ryan R.J.; Gordon, Iain J.; Janssen, Marco A.; Abel, Nick
"We explore the response of pastoralists to rangeland resource variation in time and space, focusing on regions where high variation makes it unlikely that an economically viable herd can be maintained on a single management unit. In such regions, the need to move stock to find forage in at least some years has led to the evolution of nomadism and transhumance, and reciprocal grazing agreements among the holders of common-property rangeland. The role of such informal institutions in buffering resource variation is well documented in some Asian and African rangelands, but in societies with formally established private-property regimes, where we focus, such institutions have received little attention. We examine agistment networks, which play an important role in buffering resource variation in modern-day Australia. Agistment is a commercial arrangement between pastoralists who have less forage than they believe they require and pastoralists who believe they have more. Agistment facilitates the movement of livestock via a network based largely on trust. We are concerned exclusively with the link between the characteristics of biophysical variation and human aspects of agistment networks, and we developed a model to test the hypothesis that such a link could exist. Our model builds on game theory literature, which explains cooperation between strangers based on the ability of players to learn whom they can trust. Our game is played on a highly stylized landscape that allows us to control and isolate the degree of spatial variation and spatial covariation. We found that agistment networks are more effective where spatial variation in resource availability is high, and generally more effective when spatial covariation is low. Policy design that seeks to work with existing social networks in rangelands has potential, but this potential varies depending on localized characteristics of the biophysical variability."
Playing Games to Save Water: Collective Action Games for Groundwater Management in India
(2017) Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Janssen, Marco A.; Kandikuppa, Sandeep; Chaturved, Rahul; Rao, Kaushalendra R.; Theis, Sophie
"Groundwater is one of the most challenging common pool resources to govern, resulting in resource depletion in many areas. We present an innovative use of collective action games to not only measure propensity for collective action, but to improve local understanding of groundwater interrelationships and stimulate collective governance of groundwater, based on a pilot study with NGOs in Andhra Pradesh, India. The games simulate crop choice and consequences for the aquifer. These were followed by a community debriefing, which provided an entry point for discussing the interconnectedness of groundwater use, to affect mental models about groundwater. A slightly modified game was played in the same communities, one year later. Communication within the game increased the likelihood of groups reaching sustainable extraction levels in the second year, but not the first. Individual payments to participants based on how they played in the game had no effect on crop choice. Either repeated experience with the games or the revised structure of the game evoked more cooperation in the second year, outweighing other factors such as education, gender, and trust index scores. After the games were played, a significantly higher proportion of communities have adopted water registers and rules to govern groundwater, compared to other communities in the same NGO water commons program. Because groundwater levels are affected by many factors, games alone will not end groundwater depletion, but can contribute to understanding of the role of crop choice and collective action, to motivate behavior change toward more sustainable groundwater extraction."
Population Aggregation in Ancient Arid Environments
(2010) Janssen, Marco A.
"Human societies have adapted to spatial and temporal variability, such as that found in the prehistoric American Southwest. A question remains as to what the implications are of different social adaptations to long-term vulnerability of small-scale human societies. A stylized agent-based model is presented that captures small-group decision making on movements and resource use in ancient arid environments. The impact of various assumptions concerning storage, exchange, sharing, and migration on indicators of aggregation and sustainability are explored. Climate variability is found to increase the resilience of population levels at the system level. Variability reduces the time a population stays in one location and can degrade the soils. In addition to climate variability, the long-term population dynamics is mainly driven by the level of storage and the decision rules governing when to migrate and with whom to exchange."
Resilience and Adaptation in the Governance of Social-ecological Systems
(2011) Janssen, Marco A.
"In this special issue a series of papers has been collected to further the frontier of the study of the governance of social-ecological systems. The papers are a selection of presentations from the North American Regional Meeting of the IASC, which was held from September 30 until October 3, 2010 at the Tempe campus of Arizona State University. The theme of the conference was 'Capturing the Complexity of the Commons.' Approximately 120 people participated in this event, and around 100 presentations were given. The papers that were invited for this special issue addressed the theme of resilience and adaptation in the governance of social-ecological systems."
Resilience Management in Social-Ecological Systems: A Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach
(2002) Walker, Brian H.; Carpenter, Stephen; Anderies, John M.; Abel, Nick; Cumming, Graeme S.; Janssen, Marco A.; Lebel, Louis; Norberg, Jon; Peterson, Garry D.; Pritchard, Rusty
"Approaches to natural resource management are often based on a presumed ability to predict probabilistic responses to management and external drivers such as climate. They also tend to assume that the manager is outside the system being managed. However, where the objectives include long-term sustainability, linked social-ecological systems (SESs) behave as complex adaptive systems, with the managers as integral components of the system. Moreover, uncertainties are large and it may be difficult to reduce them as fast as the system changes. Sustainability involves maintaining the functionality of a system when it is perturbed, or maintaining the elements needed to renew or reorganize if a large perturbation radically alters structure and function. The ability to do this is termed 'resilience.' This paper presents an evolving approach to analyzing resilience in SESs, as a basis for managing resilience. We propose a framework with four steps, involving close involvement of SES stakeholders. It begins with a stakeholder-led development of a conceptual model of the system, including its historical profile (how it got to be what it is) and preliminary assessments of the drivers of the supply of key ecosystem goods and services. Step 2 deals with identifying the range of unpredictable and uncontrollable drivers, stakeholder visions for the future, and contrasting possible future policies, weaving these three factors into a limited set of future scenarios. Step 3 uses the outputs from steps 1 and 2 to explore the SES for resilience in an iterative way. It generally includes the development of simple models of the system's dynamics for exploring attributes that affect resilience. Step 4 is a stakeholder evaluation of the process and outcomes in terms of policy and management implications. This approach to resilience analysis is illustrated using two stylized examples."
Resource Intruders and Robustness of Social-ecological Systems: An Irrigation System of Southeast Spain, A Case Study
(2011) Pérez, Irene; Janssen, Marco A.; Tenza, A.; Giménez, A.; Pedreño, A.; Giménez, M.
"Globalization increases the vulnerability of traditional socialecological systems (SES) to the incursion of new resource appropriators, i.e. intruders. New external disturbances that increase the physical and sociopolitical accessibility of SES (e.g. construction of a new road) and weak points in institutional SES of valuable common-pool resources are some of the main factors that enhance the encroachment of intruders. The irrigation system of the northwest Murcia Region (Spain) is an example used in this article of the changes in the structure and robustness of a traditional SES as a result of intruders. In this case study, farmers have traditionally used water from springs to irrigate their lands but, in recent decades, large agrarian companies have settled in this region, using groundwater to irrigate new lands. This intrusion had caused the levels of this resource to drop sharply. In an attempt to adapt, local communities are intensifying the use of resources and are constructing new physical infrastructures; consequently, new vulnerabilities are emerging. This situation seems to be heading toward the inevitably collapse of this traditional SES. From an institutional viewpoint, some recommendations are offered to enhance the robustness of SES in order to mitigate the consequences of intruders."
Resource Intruders and Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems: An Irrigation System of Southeast Spain. A Case Study
(2010) Pérez, Irene; Janssen, Marco A.; Giménez, A.; Tenza, A.; Pedreño, A.; Giménez, M.
"Globalization increases traditional social-ecological systems’ (SES) vulnerability to the incursion of new resource appropriators, i.e., intruders. New external disturbances that increase the physical and socio-political accessibility of SES (e.g., construction of a new road) and weak points in institutional SES of valuable common-pool resources are some of the main factors that enhance the encroachment of intruders. The irrigation system of the northwest Murcia Region (Spain) is an example used in this article of the changes in the structure and robustness of a traditional SES as a result of intruders. Farmers have traditionally used water from springs to irrigate their lands but, in recent decades, large companies have settled in this region and use groundwater to irrigate new lands. This intrusion had led the levels of this resource to drop sharply. In an attempt to adapt, local communities are intensifying the use of resources and are constructing new physical infrastructures; consequently, new vulnerabilities are emerging. This situation is inevitably heading towards the collapse of this traditional SES. From an institutional viewpoint, some recommendations are offered to enhance the robustness of SES in order to mitigate the consequences of intruders."
Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems to Spatial and Temporal Variability
(2007) Janssen, Marco A.; Anderies, John M.; Ostrom, Elinor
"Some social-ecological systems (SESs) have persisted for hundreds of years, remaining in particular configurations that have withstood a variety of natural and social disturbances. Many of these long-lived SESs have adapted their institutions to the particular pattern of variability they have experienced over time as well as to the broader economic, political, and social system in which they are located. Such adaptations alter resource use patterns in time and/or space to maintain the configuration of the SESs. Even well-adapted SESs, however, can become vulnerable to new types of disturbances. Through the analysis of a series of case studies, we begin to characterize different types of adaptations to particular types of variability and explore vulnerabilities that may emerge as a result of this adaptive process. Understanding such vulnerabilities may be critical if our interest is to contribute to the future adaptations of SESs as the more rapid processes of globalization unfold."
Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems: Implications for Public Policy
(2013) Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.
From Introduction: "Specifically, we present a framework that seeks to link the notion of the policy process to the policy context and provide a systematic approach to understand the dynamic interaction between the two. The main intent of the framework is to embed the policy process in a dynamically evolving policy context, driven by the feedbacks between biophysical processes and policy processes. Viewed in this way, the policy process can be understood as an emergent property of a dynamic, underlying social-ecological system. The framework is based on ideas from institutional rational choice and an extension of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, familiar to many policy scholars. The main contribution of this article and the framework it presents is to provide ideas, language, and tools to move, when appropriate, from the conception of the policy process shown in Figure 1 (A) in which a fixed policy context generates streams of challenges which are processed by policy subsystems in which human actors and human-made infrastructure interact to the conception pictured in Figure 1 (B) in which policies drive the dynamics of the biophysical system (natural infrastructure) in which they are embedded, generating new information that feeds back into the policy process."
Robustness Trade-offs in Social-Ecological Systems
(2007) Janssen, Marco A.; Anderies, John M.
"The governance of common-pool resources can be meaningfully examined from the somewhat broader perspective of the governance of social-ecological systems (SESs). Governance of SESs invariably involves trade-offs; trade-offs between different stakeholder objectives, trade-offs between risk and productivity, and trade-offs between short-term and long-term goals. This is especially true in the case of robustness in social-ecological systems -- i.e. the capacity to continue to meet a performance objective in the face of uncertainty and shocks. In this paper we suggest that effective governance under uncertainty must include the ongoing analysis of trade-offs between robustness and performance, and between investments in robustness to different types of perturbations. The nature of such trade-offs will depend on society's perception of risk, the dynamics of the underlying resource, and the governance regime. Specifically, we argue that it is impossible to define robustness in absolute terms. The choice for society is not only whether to invest in becoming robust to a particular disturbance, but rather, what suit of disturbances to address and what set of associated vulnerabilities is it willing to accept as a necessary consequence."
The Role of Information in Governing the Commons: Experimental Results
(2013) Janssen, Marco A.
"The structure and dynamics of ecosystems can affect the information available to resource users on the state of the common resource and the actions of other resource users. We present results from laboratory experiments that showed that the availability of information about the actions of other participants affected the level of cooperation. Since most participants in commons dilemmas can be classified as conditional cooperators, not having full information about the actions of others may affect their decisions. When participants had more information about others, there was a more rapid reduction of the resource in the first round of the experiment. When communication was allowed, limiting the information available made it harder to develop effective institutional arrangements. When communication was not allowed, there was a more rapid decline of performance in groups where information was limited. In sum, the results suggest that making information available to others can have an important impact on the conditional cooperation and the effectiveness of communication."
The Role of Information in Governing the Commons: Experimental Results
(2012) Janssen, Marco A.
"The performance of institutional arrangements is expected to depend on the fit between institutions and ecological dynamics. The ecological dynamics affect the ability of resource users to observe behavior of others as well as the state of the ecological systems. If ecological dynamics increase the costs of monitoring, we can expect institutional arrangements to be crafted that reduce the costs of monitoring. In case studies we see examples of how ecological dynamics affect rules for appropriation. We present experimental results that show that information availability affect cooperation. If it is not known that others are harvesting rapidly, we see a delay in overharvesting of a common resource. Even if communication is allowed, reduced information availability makes it harder to develop effective institutional arrangements. In the discussion of the results we suggest that the fit between institutions and ecological dynamics are a consequence of the interplay between information, conditional cooperation and trust."
Scholarly Networks on Resilience, Vulnerability and Adaptation within the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
(2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Schoon, Michael L.; Ke, Weimao; Borner, Katy
"This paper presents the results of a bibliometric analysis of the knowledge domains resilience, vulnerability and adaptation within the research activities on human dimensions of global environmental change. We analyzed how 2286 publications between 1967 and 2005 are related in terms of co-authorship relations, and citation relations. "The number of publications in the three knowledge domains increased rapidly between 1995 and 2005. However, the resilience knowledge domain is only weakly connected with the other two domains in terms of co-authorships and citations. The resilience knowledge domain has a background in ecology and mathematics with a focus on theoretical models, while the vulnerability and adaptation knowledge domains have a background in geography and natural hazards research with a focus on case studies and climate change research. There is an increasing number of cross citations and papers classified in multiple knowledge domains. This seems to indicate an increasing integration of the different knowledge domains."
Simulating Market Dynamics: Interactions between Consumer Psychology and Social Networks
(2003) Janssen, Marco A.; Jager, Wander
"Markets can show different types of dynamics, from quiet markets dominated by one or a few products, to markets with continual penetration of new and reintroduced products. In a previous article we explored the dynamics of markets from a psychological perspective using a multi-agent simulation model. The main results indicated that the behavioral rules dominating the artificial consumer's decision making determine the resulting market dynamics, such as fashions, lock-in, and unstable renewal. Results also show the importance of psychological variables like social networks, preferences, and the need for identity to explain the dynamics of markets. In this article we extend this work in two directions. First, we will focus on a more systematic investigation of the effects of different network structures. The previous article was based on Watts and Strogatz's approach, which describes the small-world and clustering characteristics in networks. More recent research demonstrated that many large networks display a scale-free power-law distribution for node connectivity. In terms of market dynamics this may imply that a small proportion of consumers may have an exceptional influence on the consumptive behavior of others (hubs, or early adapters). We show that market dynamics is a self-organized property depending on the interaction between the agents' decision-making process (heuristics), the product characteristics (degree of satisfaction of unit of consumption, visibility), and the structure of interactions between agents (size of network and hubs in a social network)."
Social Dilemmas are Only Part of the Story to Explain Overharvesting of Renewable Resources
(2016) Janssen, Marco A.
"We report on experiments with a spatial explicit dynamic resource where individuals make incentivized real-time decisions when and where to harvest the resource units. We test how individuals make decisions when they manage the resource on their own, or share a resource twice the size with another person. We find that most individuals do not harvest resources close to the optimal strategy when they manage the resource individually, and this relates to their understanding of the instructions and their social orientation. Cooperators let resources grow even when there is no social dilemma. In group rounds, there is more overharvesting, especially if participants are selfish and have a low understanding of the instructions. The results show that a better understanding of the motivations of participants is needed to explain the observed behavior."
Social Roles and Performance of Social-Ecological Systems: Evidence from Behavioral Lab Experiments
(2015) Pérez, Irene; Yu, David J.; Anderies, John M.; Janssen, Marco A.
"Social roles are thought to play an important role in determining the capacity for collective action in a community regarding the use of shared resources. Here we report on the results of a study using a behavioral experimental approach regarding the relationship between social roles and the performance of social-ecological systems. The computer-based irrigation experiment that was the basis of this study mimics the decisions faced by farmers in small-scale irrigation systems. In each of 20 rounds, which are analogous to growing seasons, participants face a two-stage commons dilemma. First they must decide how much to invest in the public infrastructure, e.g., canals and water diversion structures. Second, they must decide how much to extract from the water made available by that public infrastructure. Each round begins with a 60-second communication period before the players make their investment and extraction decisions. By analyzing the chat messages exchanged among participants during the communication stage of the experiment, we coded up to three roles per participant using the scheme of seven roles known to be important in the literature: leader, knowledge generator, connector, follower, moralist, enforcer, and observer. Our study supports the importance of certain social roles (e.g., connector) previously highlighted by several case study analyses. However, using qualitative comparative analysis we found that none of the individual roles was sufficient for groups to succeed, i.e., to reach a certain level of group production. Instead, we found that a combination of at least five roles was necessary for success. In addition, in the context of upstream-downstream asymmetry, we observed a pattern in which social roles assumed by participants tended to differ by their positions. Although our work generated some interesting insights, further research is needed to determine how robust our findings are to different action situations, such as biophysical context, social network, and resource uncertainty."
Stimulating Contributions to Public Goods through Information Feedback: Some Experimental Rules
(2016) Janssen, Marco A.; Lee, Allen; Sundaram, Hari
"In traditional public good experiments participants receive an endowment from the experimenter that can be invested in a public good or kept in a private account. In this paper we present an experimental environment where participants can invest time during five days to contribute to a public good. Participants can make contributions to a linear public good by logging into a web application and performing virtual actions. We compared four treatments, with different group sizes and information of (relative) performance of other groups. We find that information feedback about performance of other groups has a small positive effect if we control for various attributes of the groups. Moreover, we find a significant effect of the contributions of others in the group in the previous day on the number of points earned in the current day. Our results confirm that people participate more when participants in their group participate more, and are influenced by information about the relative performance of other groups."