Governance as a Complex System
Short description
Since 2023 has GLD sought to incorporate complexity science into our thinking, beginning with attending complex systems conferences to get a sense of the state-of-the-art and organizing reading groups to help our staff learn what complex systems are, how they are being applied to social science problems, and how they show up in our work on governance.
About the Project
While there is no single agreed upon definition of a complex system, it can be generally thought of as a system compromised of many components/agents with many interactions between them. These interactions result in emergent phenomena that could not be understood by analyzing any isolated part of the system alone.
At GLD, we believe that there is much to learn from the field of complexity science. Since 2023 has GLD sought to incorporate complexity science into our thinking, beginning with attending complex systems conferences to get a sense of the state-of-the-art and organizing reading groups to help our staff learn what complex systems are, how they are being applied to social science problems, and how they show up in our work on governance.
GLD is collaborating with 5 external scholars on a paper that seeks to use complex systems models to understand aspects of discrimination and citizenship, motivated by GLD’s data on ethnic social institutions in Kenya, Zambia, and Malawi.
We thank the organizers of the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems 2024 for hosting the event that brought our team together and facilitated the initial stage in the project.
Collaborating Researchers
- Gustavo Cadenas Delascio, University of Oslo
- Violeta Calleja Solanas, Doñana Biological Station
- Felix Jäger, University of Hohenheim
- Eider L. Perez-Ordoyo Bellido, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Emmy Tither, University of Illinois