Journal article
Response diversity as a sustainability strategy

Walker, B., A.S. Crepin, M. Nyström, J.M. Anderies, E. Andersson, T. Elmqvist, C. Queiroz, S. Barrett, E. Bennett, J.C. Cardenas, S.R. Carpenter, F.S. Chapin III, A. de Zeeuw, J. Fischer, C. Folke, S. Levin, K. Nyborg, S. Polasky, K. Segerson, K. Seto, M. Scheffer, J.F. Shogren, A. Tavoni, J. van den Bergh, E.U. Weber, and J.R. Vincent. 2023. Response diversity as a sustainability strategy. Nature Sustainability 6:621-629.

Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses...

Journal article
Infrastructure and the energy use of human polities

Freeman, J., J.A. Baggio, L. Miranda, and J.M. Anderies. 2023. Infrastructure and the energy use of human polities. Cross-Cultural Research 57(2-3):294-322.

his paper integrates scaling theory with variation in systems of governance to help explain cross-cultural differences in the energy use of human polities. In both industrial and pre-industrial polities, systems of governance moderate the scaling of population and energy use. Polities with more inclusive governance systems display, on average, lower energy use per agent. However, as populations increase in size, the energy consumed by polities...

Journal article
Environmental change and ecosystem functioning drive transitions in social-ecological systems: A stylized modelling approach

Eppinga, M.B., H.J. de Boer, M.O. Reader, J.M. Anderies, and M.J. Santos. 2023. Environmental change and ecosystem functioning drive transitions in social-ecological systems: A stylized modelling approach. Ecological Economics 211:107861.

Sustainable management of social-ecological systems requires an understanding of how anthropogenic climate- and land use change may disrupt interactions between human societies and the ecosystem processes they depend on. In this study, we expand an existing stylized social-ecological system model by explicitly considering how urbanizing societies may become less dependent on local ecosystem functioning. This expansion is motivated by a previously developed conceptual framework suggesting that societies...

Book chapter
Conservation of fragility and the collapse of social orders

Anderies, J.M. and S.A. Levin. 2023. Conservation of fragility and the collapse of social orders. In: Centeno, M., P. Callahan, P. Larcey, and T. Patterson (eds.). How Worlds Collapse: What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile Future. Routledge, New York, U.S.. Pp. 282-295.

John Anderies and Simon Levin discuss the importance of studying regulatory feedback mechanisms to understand collapse, writing that these mechanisms are “extraordinarily powerful,” critical for creating and maintaining a system’s structure and dynamics and that their regulation is “ubiquitous in biological and social systems.” With the criticality of these mechanisms in mind, the authors discuss the potential usefulness of the “Coupled Infrastructure Systems” (CIS) framework,...

Journal article
Understanding how governance emerges in social- ecological systems: Insights from archetype analysis

Aggarwal, R.M. and J.M. Anderies. 2023. Understanding how governance emerges in social- ecological systems: Insights from archetype analysis. Ecology and Society 28(2):2.

This paper is motivated by the question: how does governance emerge within social-ecological systems (SESs)? Addressing this question is critical for fostering sustainable transformations because it directs attention to the context specific and process intensive nature of governance as arising from the internal dynamics (i.e., interplay of feedbacks and interdependencies between the components) of SESs. This contrasts with the commonly held view of governance as...

Journal article
Resilience-performance trade-offs in managing social-ecological systems

Homayounfar, M., R. Muneepeerakul, and J.M. Anderies. 2022. Resilience-performance trade-offs in managing social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 27(1).

Resilience-based approaches have been attracting attention in governing social-ecological systems facing rapid social and environmental changes. In this article, we investigate the governance policies that focus on resilience. Our analysis is built on a stylized dynamical model that mathematically operationalizes a widely used conceptual framework, which links social components, natural resources, and infrastructure in social-ecological systems. Specifically, we numerically solve the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation to...

Book chapter
Sustainability transitions in urban water management: Assessing the robustness of institutional arrangements

Deslatte, A., M. Garcia, E.A. Koebele, and J.M. Anderies. 2022. Sustainability transitions in urban water management: Assessing the robustness of institutional arrangements. In: Bolognesi, T., F.S. Pinto, and M. Farelli. Routledge Handbook of Urban Water Governance. Taylor & Francis, Oxon, U.K. Pp. 284-296.

Transitions toward sustainability are triggered by confluences of natural, built infrastructure, and social, economic, and political factors. As many urban water management regimes across the globe increasingly face hydrologic stress, it is critical to systematically understand how these factors interact to hasten or inhibit transitions to more sustainable states. Scholars have used many frameworks to study transitions. This chapter applies one of them, the Robustness...

Journal article
Assessing sustainability through the institutional grammar of urban water systems

Deslatte, A., L. Helmke-Long, J.M. Anderies, M. Garcia, G.M. Hornberger, and E.A. Koebele. 2022. Assessing sustainability through the institutional grammar of urban water systems. Policy Studies Journal 50(2):387-406.

Urban water supply systems in the United States are designed to be robust to a wide range of historical hydrological conditions in both their physical infrastructure and in the institutional arrangements that govern their use. However, these systems vary greatly in their capacity to respond to new and evolving stressors on water supplies, such as those associated with climate change. Developing a more precise understanding...

Journal article
Harnessing the benefits of diversity to address socio-environmental governance challenges

Baggio, J.A., J. Freeman, T.R. Coyle, and J.M. Anderies. 2022. Harnessing the benefits of diversity to address socio-environmental governance challenges. PLOS ONE 17(8):e0263399.

Solving complex problems, from biodiversity conservation to reducing inequality, requires large scale collective action among diverse stakeholders to achieve a common goal. Research relevant to meeting this challenge must model the interaction of stakeholders with diverse cognitive capabilities and the complexity of the problem faced by stakeholders to predict the success of collective action in various contexts. Here, we build a model from first principles...

Journal article
A framework for conceptualizing and modeling social-ecological systems for conservation research

Anderies, J.M., G.S. Cumming, H.S. Clements, S.J. Lade, R. Seppelt, S. Chawla, and B. Müller. 2022. A framework for conceptualizing and modeling social-ecological systems for conservation research. Biological Conservation 275:109769.

As conservation biology has matured, its scope has expanded from a primarily ecological focus to recognition that nearly all conservation problems involve people. At the same time, conservation actions have been increasingly informed by ever more sophisticated quantitative models. These models have focused primarily on ecological and geographic elements of conservation problems, such as mark-recapture methods, predicting species occurrences, and optimizing the placement of protected areas. There...