The Resilient World

People and Place provides another winning post, this time reporting on a 2009 National Research Council document. The six principles for effective decision-support are also six good principles for building resilient institutions.

Amplify’d from www.peopleandplace.net

Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate is a 2009 U.S. National Research Council publication. At the core of the book are six principles for effective decision support. (This text is shortened, without ellipses.)

We found that the same core principles that characterize effective decision support in such areas as public health, natural resource management, and environmental risk management apply to informing decisions about responses to climate change: (1) begin with users’ needs; (2) give priority to process over products; (3) link information producers and users; (4) build connections across disciplines and organizations; (5) seek institutional stability; and (6) design processes for learning. Read more at www.peopleandplace.net

URL:  http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1416434884618

In an earlier post, I wrote about the possibility that cooperation emerges not out of altruism but out of the need to impose sanctions in an increasingly complex society.

I've been working on a few problems in Africa linked to failed or nonexistent institutions. Ann Swidler, of UC Berkeley, recently spoke at Harvard on the hard questions in social sciences. She drives to the heart of the problem. How, she asks, do societies create or restore institutions? "The inability to have effective institutions" she says, "is one of the greatest curses under which people live." What creates robust, effective, resilient institutions? Being culturally rooted really matters, she argues. Effective institutions are culturally embedded. Where there is a rich cultural background, people know how to operate within it; "the informal habits that go with them culturally are present." Cultural embedding creates "a narrative that aligns your own moral incentives with the institution in such a way that defection is less visible and cooperation is more visible. it also creates ... ritual moments where the status of those who contribute to the collectivity is symbolically recognized and status is reinforced... You use ritual moments to rehearse who your allies are, who's closest to you, who's done the most for the community, and who is likely to do the most. It reinforces bonds."

Biologists and ecologists are no more talented than is the US Army at institution building. Designing protected areas and conservation programs according to accepted conservation practice sounds good on paper, but science has a tin ear for music of cooperation. Different approaches are required. I'm working on a paper now with Kirk Talbott on the cooperative mechanisms behind the emergence of the Bonobo Peace Forest in war-torn DRC. If successful this program will sustainably manage an area the size of Great Britain using customary tenure establish domain boundaries. Established conservation practice would entail excising the high value conservation lands from customary tenure and placing it under a unified external authority - not a recipe for long-term success. Ecologists and biologists are trying hard to understand how to build institutions to protect biodiversity. The challenge is combining different rule sets. I think we can learn a lot from Ann Swidler.

Tip of the hat to Howard Silverman at People and Place for posting on Swidler and her talk (http://www.peopleandplace.net/on_the_wire/2011/2/14/ann_swidler_creating_and_restoring_institutions)

Borrowed from the Committee on Public Safety wholesale, with apologies. It's too rich to summarize. All I can say is that if this interests you, subscribe to the RSS feed for Joseph Fouche's blog, and strap in! It's going to be a wild ride.

It's interesting to look at current events through this lens. Never mind if the numbering is messed up - just go to the original source.

Amplify’d from committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com

A riff on David Ronfeldt’s Tribe-Institution-Market-Network framework and its possible relationship with Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies mixed with a grab bag of ideas good, bad, and indifferent:

The tribal form focuses on interaction, the realm of tactics.

The institutional form focuses on control, the realm of strategy.

The market form focuses on dividing power, the realm of politics.

The network form focuses on prioritizing purpose, the realm of culture.

From time to time, certain tribes win control over power through the market and congeal along a network of similar purpose into institutions.

A new institution is a particular reconciliation of power, control, and purpose based on a particular shared strategic equilibrium.

Strategy is a sort of institution-wide coup d’oeil, a largely tacit, largely contingent, and somewhat explicit orientation. When a strategy is in equilibrium, it’s been called a political formula, asabiyah, paradigm, stimergy, Zeitgeist, a myth, or creed.

An institution deals with other social forms outside in the market and along the network and with the tribal, market, and networked centers of gravity within it.

Social forms within an institution become different, now co centers of gravity.

Actual interaction with external or internal social forms happens on a tribal and tactical scale.

Friction builds within an institution as internal centers of gravity shift between the competing pull of the tacit, contingent, and the correlation of power with external social forms shifts.

An institution’s path from power to control to purpose shifts from the efficient tacit path to the less efficient explicit path.

In response to friction, institutional centers of gravity shift from an institutional strategic orientation to tribal tactical decision-making.

Friction drive internal centers of gravity toward making what started as strategic and tacit ever more tactical and explicit.

This effort reinforces the more visible tactical manifestations of the original strategy and not those less visible parts of the strategy that past institutional success was actually built upon.

Driving the tacit into the explicit generates even more friction by increasing institutional complexity.

Increasingly explicit decision-making imposes more strain on the information processing capacity of an institution compared to the original, and more efficient, tacit orientation, consuming more and more institutional power.

The original institutional strategy reaches its culminating point and begins breaking down.

The response to tacit strategy breaking down: more explicit tribal tactical decision-making.

Diminishing returns on the original strategic tacit orientation set in. The easy becomes more difficult. More power is consumed for less return.

Complexity and friction become overwhelming. The recommended cure: more explicit tactical decision-making.

Strategic inertia sets in since the negative object of defense is stronger than the positive object of offense.

Tribes begin to opt out of the increasingly burdensome institution, seeking mental relief from the mental effort of the explicit by reverting to a simpler tribal form.

Entropy grows as crisis destroys the last embers of the original tacit strategic equilibrium.

An institution ultimately breaks down into competing and unharmonious explicit tribal centers of gravity where once there was a cooperative and harmonious single institutional center of gravity.

Survivors of a failing institution don’t understand how an institution originally succeeded and don’t understand how it ultimately failed. They only see the explicit, can’t fathom the contingent, and barely see the tacit.

Institutional knowledge is dispersed back into the network from which it originally emerged, remaining stored there if the network is of sufficient scale and diversity.

If enough knowledge is dispersed through the network, the level of complexity an institution can process while drawing on the market and networks its embedded within may ratchet upwards in spite of individual institutional collapses.

Networks and markets may also enable revival of moribund institutions by producing fortuitous shifts in an institution’s strategic orientation that better allow it to reconcile power, control, and purpose.

Networks and markets have the potential to spawn new institutions if earlier institutions have a complete institutional breakdown. Read more at committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com