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Now showing 1 - 10 of 11
  • Journal Article
    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."
  • Journal Article
    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."
  • Journal Article
    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."
  • Journal Article
    An Update on the Scholarly Networks on Resilience, Vulnerability, and Adaptation within the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
    (2007) Janssen, Marco A.
    "In Janssen et al. (2006), we presented a bibliometric analysis of the resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation knowledge domains within the research activities on human dimensions of global environmental change. We have updated the analysis because 2 years have gone by since the original analysis, and 1113 more publications can now be added to the database. We analyzed how the resulting 3399 publications between 1967 and 2007 are related in terms of co-authorship and citations. The rapid increase in the number of publications in the three knowledge domains continued over the last 2 years, and we still see an overlap between the knowledge domains. We were also able to identify the hot publications of the last 2 years."
  • Journal Article
    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."
  • Journal Article
    An Uncommon Scholar of the Commons
    (2012) Folke, Carl; Anderies, John M.; Gunderson, Lance; Janssen, Marco A.
    "We wish to dedicate this midyear editorial and issue of Ecology and Society to Elinor (Lin) Ostrom who died 12 June from pancreatic cancer at the age of 78 years. Lin was a pioneer in many ways and was incredibly impressive in breaking through many barriers on her way to a remarkable set of life achievements."
  • Journal Article
    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."
  • Journal Article
    Toward a Network Perspective of the Study of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
    (2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Bodin, Örjan; Anderies, John M.; Elmqvist, Thomas; Ernstson, Henrik; McAllister, Ryan R.J.; Olsson, Per; Ryan, Paul
    "Formal models used to study the resilience of social-ecological systems have not explicitly included important structural characteristics of this type of system. In this paper, we propose a network perspective for social-ecological systems that enables us to better focus on the structure of interactions between identifiable components of the system. This network perspective might be useful for developing formal models and comparing case studies of social-ecological systems. Based on an analysis of the case studies in this special issue, we identify three types of social-ecological networks: (1) ecosystems that are connected by people through flows of information or materials, (2) ecosystem networks that are disconnected and fragmented by the actions of people, and (3) artificial ecological networks created by people, such as irrigation systems. Each of these three archytypal social-ecological networks faces different problems that influence its resilience as it responds to the addition or removal of connections that affect its coordination or the diffusion of system attributes such as information or disease."
  • Journal Article
    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."
  • Journal Article
    Stimulating Diffusion of Green Products: Co-evolution between Firms and Consumers
    (2002) Janssen, Marco A.; Jager, Wander
    "This paper presents a model-based analysis of the introduction of green products, which are products with low environmental impacts. Both consumers and firms are simulated as populations of agents who differ in their behavioral characteristics. Model experiments illustrate the influence of behavioral characteristics on the success of switching to green consumption. The model reproduces empirical observed stylized facts and shows the importance of social processing and status seeking in diffusion processes. The flexibility of firms to adapt to new technology is found to have an important influence on the type of consumers who change their consumption to green products in the early phase of the diffusion process."