Academic Journal Article

Anticipating Critical Transitions

The authors define a “tipping point” in terms of “a catastrophic bifurcation, where a minor trigger can invoke a self-propagating shift to a contrasting state.” Such “critical transitions” appear in nature and society but remain difficult to predict. The authors propose that complex systems with feature high connectivity and high homogeneity are particularly vulnerable to […]

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Going South: Capitalist Crisis, Systemic Crisis, Civilisational Crisis

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, Barry K. Gills argues that the world is actually in “a multidimensional set of simultaneous and interacting crises on a global scale” that he terms a “triple conjuncture.” It involves: A capitalist crisis of over-accumulation that includes the externalities of neoliberalism. A world system crisis

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Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies

The authors propose that socio-ecological systems feature the co-evolution of ecological systems and self-reinforcing complexes of (human) worldviews, institutions, and technologies (WITs). Contemporary WITs arose in a world of abundant resources and immense potential for growth but are now reaching the biophysical limits of the ecosphere. The authors thus advocate a deliberate shift from and

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Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems

The authors argue that “the stability dynamics of all linked systems of humans and nature emerge from three complimentary attributes: resilience, adaptability, and transformability” (p. 1), then distinguish and clarify these core concepts. “Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the

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What Is Systemic Risk, and Do Bank Regulators Retard or Contribute to It?

George G. Kaufman and Kenneth E. Scott provide one of the most often cited definitions of systemic risk as “the risk or probability of breakdowns in an entire system, as opposed to breakdowns in individual parts or components, and is evidenced by co-movements (correlations) among most or all parts” (p. 371). They explain how systemic

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Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems

C. S. Holling argues that ecosystems, economies, and societies periodically undergo four stages of an adaptive cycle in which their levels of resilience, connectivity, and wealth (or “potential”) vary in characteristic ways. Over time, a system gets locked-in to a particular way of operating in which it accumulates immense wealth, expands connectivity to maximize efficiency,

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