BBL Prof. J. Marty Anderies: What is Governance?: Institutions and the Performance of Coupled Infrastructure Systems

In this talk, I will present recent results of a large team effort at the Center for Behavior, Institutions, and the Environment (cbie.asu.edu) to understand "governance" and the operation of institutions in the context of complex social-ecological systems. I will illustrate a multimethod approach guided by a framework based on SES research and institutional analysis to understand the intricate relationship between institutions and the biophysical and social context in which they are embedded and how this relationship conditions the function of institutions in SESs. This work helps clarify our understanding of what is often loosely referred to as "governance" and its impact on the performance of what we refer to as "coupled infrastructure systems" of which SESs are special cases. <br /><br />Biography<br />Dr. J. Marty Anderies' research interests focus on developing an understanding of how ecological, behavioral, social, and institutional factors affect the robustness/vulnerability characteristics of social-ecological systems. His work combines qualitative insights from present- day, historical, and archaeological case studies of social-ecological systems with formal mathematical modeling and experiments with human subjects to study how individual decision- making processes interact with governance regimes to influence social and environmental outcomes. Other areas of interest include economic growth, demographics, and theoretical ecology. Dr. Anderies teaches Dynamic Modeling in Social and Ecological Systems; Dynamic Modeling for Sustainability Science, Collective Action and Decision Making for Sustainability, and Rules, Games, and Society. Dr. Anderies is Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Dr. Anderies received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from The University of British Columbia where he worked on bioecononomic modeling of human-environment interactions. He then spent 3 years as a postdoctoral researcher at CSIRO in Canberra, Australia where he worked with Brian Walker to formalize the concept of resilience in social-ecological systems.