Complexity

Listen to this series of podcasts hosted by the Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG) at the University of Cape Town. These are conversations between researchers and partners across Africa and globally, covering a range of topics from climate science to social science and philosophy.

The Cascading Climate Impacts Policy Simulation encourages us to go beyond the linear process in which science is passed on to society after its production by offering a more interactive and productive arrangement between science and science users.

Deciding upon policy interventions to support community resilience presents us with both a ‘wicked’ and a
‘messy’ problem and calls for ‘clumsy’ policy solutions and interventions.

A giant board game that gets youth to prioritise resources in their community which are vulnerable to extreme weather. Youth negotiate to take individual or collective actions to adapt resources.

A card game to see how people, places and things (resources) fit into systems, followed by an activity to systematically brainstorm and prioritise community resources.

The aim of this paper is to examine adaptive governance as a theory of environmental governance.

Abstract Within development cooperation, development issues are increasingly recognized as complex problems requiring new paths towards solving them. In addition...

Drawing on insights from complexity science, this paper describes what processes are needed to promote Flexible and Forward-looking Decision Making (FFDM).

In agent based models, a society is represented by a set of agents interacting with one another and with their environment. Agents follow simple rules but can be designed to adapt their behaviour to satisfy certain goals. Thus they can be responsive to changes in the environment, such as groundwater availability in the example here.