ADAPTING A MALADAPTIVE SOCIETY: Institutional Ecology vs. Economics

“Economists got away from really questioning how the world works, how decisions actually got made”. ___ W. Brian Arthur

“The major problems in the world are result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”. ___ Gregory Bateson

“When a living system is suffering from ill health, the remedy is found by connecting with more of itself”. ___ Franciso Varela

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent that survive, but those that can respond to change”. ___ Charles Darwin

“The crises we face are systemic in nature. To overcome those crises, we need to understand how systems work. To arrive at such an understanding, we need to think systemically.” ___ Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

Choosing Systemic Choices

Whenever I taught a class on systems thinking, I would remind students, that systems dynamics (feedback loops, nonlinearity, etc.) are simply an explanation of “how things actually work”. And these curious processes produce “emergent properties”, making the system “greater than the sum of its parts”. Plus, the new socio-ecological science of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), demonstrates how small choices can explode into dramatic systems wide changes. Hence CAS both presents alternative explanations and affords very different choices. From a policy perspective, these Systemic Choices (as I call them) are those that…