Browsing by Author "Muneepeerakul, Rachata"

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The Effect of Infrastructure on Social-Ecological System Dynamics: Provision Thresholds and Asymmetric Access
(2014) Yu, David J.; Qubbaj, Murad R.; Muneepeerakul, Rachata; Anderies, John M.
"For several millennia, humans have created built environments to harness natural processes for their benefit. Today, human-environment interactions are mediated extensively by physical infrastructure in both rural and urban environments. Yet studies of social-ecological systems (SESs) have not paid sufficient attention to how infrastructure influences coupled natural and social processes. This misses an important point: critical infrastructure is often a public good that depends on cooperation of the agents who share it. Using a model of an irrigation system (the most ancient of public infrastructure systems) as a testing ground, we found that two properties of infrastructure, threshold of provision and asymmetric access to benefits, can cause fundamental changes in the long-term dynamics of SESs. We also found some design implications for robust/resilient human-natural-engineered systems that can maintain vital functions in the face of unexpected shocks, something that has been missing in general from the broad literature.Understanding how small scale irrigation SESs may respond to infrastructure changes and globalization-related stresses is relevant for agricultural policy and our results provide some general guidance in this regard."
How Does a Divided Population Respond to Change?
(2015) Qubbaj, Murad R.; Muneepeerakul, Rachata; Aggarwal, Rimjhim; Anderies, John M.
""Most studies on the response of socioeconomic systems to a sudden shift focus on long-term equilibria or end points. Such narrow focus forgoes many valuable insights. Here we examine the transient dynamics of regime shift on a divided population, exemplified by societies divided ideologically, politically, economically, or technologically. Replicator dynamics is used to investigate the complex transient dynamics of the population response. Though simple, our modeling approach exhibits a surprisingly rich and diverse array of dynamics. Our results highlight the critical roles played by diversity in strategies and the magnitude of the shift. Importantly, it allows for a variety of strategies to arise organically as an integral part of the transient dynamics—as opposed to an independent process—of population response to a regime shift, providing a link between the population's past and future diversity patterns. Several combinations of different populations' strategy distributions and shifts were systematically investigated. Such rich dynamics highlight the challenges of anticipating the response of a divided population to a change. The findings in this paper can potentially improve our understanding of a wide range of socio-ecological and technological transitions."