John M. Anderies

Arizona State University | ASU · School of Human Evolution and Social Change

Urban drinking water systems in the US face diverse challenges and stressors, threatening their ability to reliably provide safe, affordable drinking water. To effectively address these challenges, utilities must understand the complex relationships among the community , biophysical, infrastructural, and institutional attributes of their system and...

Equity is core to sustainability, but current interventions to enhance sustainability often fall short in adequately addressing this linkage. Models are important tools for informing action, and their development and use present opportunities to center equity in process and outcomes. This Perspective highlights progress in integrating equity into s...

Over the last 12,000 y, human populations have expanded and transformed critical earth systems. Yet, a key unresolved question in the environmental and social sciences remains: Why did human populations grow and, sometimes, decline in the first place? Our research builds on 20 y of archaeological research studying the deep time dynamics of human po...

The notion of a safe operating space for humanity has recently emerged as a conceptual guide for global-scale sustainability policy challenges. While the Planetary Boundaries Framework defines this space and has spurred empirical work to determine where the Earth system is relative to its boundaries, even less is known regarding the capacity of glo...

Despite years of debate, the factors that control the long-term carrying capacity of human populations are not well understood. In this paper, we assess the effect of changes in resource extraction and climate-driven changes in ecosystem productivity on the carrying capacity of hunter-gatherer populations in a terrestrial and coastal ecosystem. To...

The Anthropocene is characterized by the strengthening of planetary-scale interactions between the biophysical Earth system (ES) and human societies. This increasing social-ecological entanglement poses new challenges for studying possible future World-Earth system (WES) trajectories and World-Earth resilience defined as the capacity of the system...

We propose a model that may explain long-term population growth and decline events among human populations: The intensification of production generates a tradeoff between the adaptive capacity of individuals to generate a surplus of energy to maximize their fitness in the short-run and the long-term capacity of a population as a whole to experience...

Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature ofte...

This paper integrates scaling theory with variation in systems of governance to help explain cross-cultural differences in the energy use of human polities. In both industrial and pre-industrial polities, systems of governance moderate the scaling of population and energy use. Polities with more inclusive governance systems display, on average, low...

As conservation biology has matured, its scope has expanded from a primarily ecological focus to recognition that nearly all conservation problems involve people. At the same time, conservation actions have been increasingly informed by ever more sophisticated quantitative models. These models have focused primarily on ecological and geographic ele...

Solving complex problems, from biodiversity conservation to reducing inequality, requires large scale collective action among diverse stakeholders to achieve a common goal. Research relevant to meeting this challenge must model the interaction of stakeholders with diverse cognitive capabilities and the complexity of the problem faced by stakeholder...

We develop a framework within which to conceptualize World-Earth System resilience. Our notion of World-Earth System resilience emphasizes the need to move beyond the basin of attraction notion of resilience as we are not in a basin we can stay in. We are on a trajectory to a new basin and we have to avoid falling into undesirable basins. We thus f...

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital—equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth’s current trajectory and support for...

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of...

Resilience-based approaches have been attracting attention in governing social-ecological systems facing rapid social and environmental changes. In this article, we investigate the governance policies that focus on resilience. Our analysis is built on a stylized dynamical model that mathematically operationalizes a widely used conceptual framework,...

Comparative institutional analyses of social-ecological systems (SESs) have advanced our understanding of features and performances of single institutions such as state, market, and self-organized institutions. However, such studies have hardly extended our understanding of institutional diversity to combinations of different institutions and their...

Climate change is a problem that requires a multi-scale response from the individual to the global. Each level and type of entity has some capacity to influence climate change action and policy, but as a multi-level collective action problem, it is not surprising that there is underprovision of climate change action; this challenge highlights the n...

Describing and explaining the population growth trajectories of prehistoric hunter-gatherers is an important research problem. Large radiocarbon data sets provide one empirical starting point for describing these trajectories; however, explaining trajectories of growth must always take place within the context of theory. In this paper, we formalize...

Explaining the stability of human populations provides knowledge for understanding the resilience of human societies to environmental change. Here, we use archaeological radiocarbon records to evaluate a hypothesis drawn from resilience thinking that may explain the stability of human populations: Faced with long-term increases in population densit...

Urban water supply systems in the United States are designed to be robust to a wide range of historical hydrological conditions in both their physical infrastructure and in the institutional arrangements that govern their use. However, these systems vary greatly in their capacity to respond to new and evolving stressors on water supplies, such as t...

Locust outbreaks have impacted agricultural societies for millennia, they persist today, and humans aim to manage them using preventative strategies. While locusts have been a focus for natural sciences for more than a century, social sciences remain largely underrepresented. Yet, organizational, economic, and cultural variables substantially impac...

Lasting community-based governance of common-pool resources depends on communities self-organizing to monitor compliance with rules. Monitoring serves an important function in community-based governance by establishing conditions for long-term cooperation, but the factors that foster its provision are poorly understood. We have analysed data from 1...

A generalized knowledge of social-ecological relationships is needed to address current environmental challenges. Broadly comparative and synthetic research is a key method for establishing this type of knowledge. To date, however, most work on social-ecological systems has applied idiosyncratic methods to specific systems. Several projects, each b...

As planetary boundaries loom, there is an urgent need to develop sustainable equilibriums between societies and the resources they consume, thereby avoiding regime shifts to undesired states. Transient system trajectories to a stable state may differ substantially, posing significant challenges to distinguishing sustainable from unsustainable traje...

In order to smooth the availability of water and address water scarcity, shared irrigation infrastructure is constructed in many irrigation systems. However, maintaining contributions to shared infrastructure has grown increasingly challenging as private infrastructure, such as groundwater pumps, have become attractive substitutes. This problem is...

Climate change is reshaping the comparative advantage of regions and hence driving migration flows, principally toward urban areas. Migration has multiple benefits and costs in both origin and destination regions. Coordinated policies that recognize how and why people move can reduce future costs and facilitate adaptation to climate change both wit...

As cities and agricultural areas face water challenges associated with climate change, it is important to develop a better understanding of how human and natural systems will respond at the scales at which those changes will occur. This requires analytical tools to systematically explore regional contexts where multiple interdependent water, agricu...

Two social feedbacks critical for redressing decline in organizational performance are exit (changing membership to a better performing organization) and voice (members' expression of discontent). In self-governing organizations of common-pool resources (CPRs) experiencing decline from poor rule conformance, the exit option is often unavailable due...

Explaining variation in human population density constitutes a basic research problem in human ecology and archaeological science. To contribute to this basic research problem, we build a graphic model and conduct a global analysis of the effects of ecological variables, controlling for technological differences, on human population density. Our re...

The world is facing new environmental challenges that may trigger the collapse of some social-ecological systems (SES). More extreme weather events may be much more common in the decades to come due to climate change. Although we have an idea of what climatic events to expect in each region, we know less about how SES can cope with these challenges...

With the increasing number of adaptation plans being generated across the world at multiple scales and levels of organization, the issue of coordination among plans is emerging as a significant challenge. We focus on how lack of coordination may constrain their efficiency as a result of potential transfers of vulnerability. This paper focuses on in...

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded;...

Tipping point dynamics are fundamental drivers for sustainable transition pathways of social-ecological systems (SES). Current research predominantly analyzes how crossing tipping points causes regime shifts, however, the analysis of potential transition pathways from these social and ecological tipping points is often overlooked. In this paper, we...

Significance Many small-scale, self-organized systems have persisted for hundreds of years and been the subject of studies seeking to understand effective governance. The lack of formal analytically tractable models of such coupled infrastructure systems hinders linking knowledge gained from those studies to such concepts as resilience and robustne...

The U.S. highway system is an iconic example of civil infrastructure. Yet it also exemplifies the challenges of infrastructure sustainability. The American Society for Civil Engineers gave the American road infrastructure a grade of “D” since the roads “are often crowded, frequently in poor condition, chronically underfunded, and are becoming more...

Individual organisms on land and in the ocean sequester massive amounts of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans. Yet the role of ecosystems as a whole in modulating this uptake of carbon is less clear. Here, we study several different mechanisms by which climate change and ecosystems could interact. We show that climate change could cau...

Human behaviour is of profound significance in shaping pathways towards sustainability. Yet, the approach to understanding human behaviour in many fields remains reliant on overly simplistic models. For a better understanding of the interface between human behaviour and sustainability, we take work in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology...

Understanding social-ecological system (SES) feedbacks and interactions is crucial to improving societal resilience to growing environmental challenges. Social-ecological systems are usually researched at one of two spatial scales: local placed-based empirical studies or system-scale modelling, with limited efforts to date exploring the merits of c...

There are numerous frameworks for studying the governance of shared resources that have been discussed extensively in the literature. Although these frameworks have been applied to multiple case studies, these applications are often idiosyncratic, subject to the interpretation of the researcher, and raise concerns regarding the operational use of f...

Sustainability within planetary boundaries requires concerted action by individuals, governments, civil society and private actors. For the private sector, there is concern that the power exercised by transnational corporations generates, and is even central to, global environmental change. Here, we ask under which conditions transnational corporat...

Taking inspiration from the archaeology of the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP), we develop an ecological theory of population distribution among mobile hunter-gatherers. This theory proposes that, due to the heterogeneity of resources in space and time, foragers create networks of habitats that they access through residential cycling and shared knowledge...

To determine the resilience of complex social-ecological systems (SESs) it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the system behavior under changing political, economic, and environmental conditions (i.e., external system stressors). Such behavior can be predicted if one knows the stable and unstable equilibrium states in a system and how...

Landscape scientists have increasingly studied sustainability during the past three decades, with a plurality of perspectives and methods. However, a comprehensive review of the relevant literature is still lacking. Two concepts capture the core of these studies: sustainable landscapes (SL) and landscape sustainability (LS). Here we present a bibli...

Social conflicts related to biodiversity conservation and adaptation policy to climate change in coastal areas illustrate the need to reinforce understanding of the “matters of concern” as well as the “matters of fact”. In this paper, we argue that we must rethink adaptation from a new perspective, considering that humans together function as both...

Decision makers often have to act before critical times to avoid the collapse of ecosystems using knowledge that can be incomplete or biased. Adaptive management may help managers tackle such issues. However, because the knowledge infrastructure required for adaptive management may be mobilized in several ways, we study the quality and the quantity...

Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Most studies have either focused on qualitative approaches to discuss th...

We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the Holocene and statistically quantify coincident changes in the consumption of energy over space and time—an ecological phenomenon known as synchrony. When populations synchronize, adverse changes in ecosystems and social systems may cascade from society t...

Maintaining safe operating spaces for exploited natural systems in the face of uncertainty is a key sustainability challenge. This challenge can be viewed as a problem in which human society must navigate in a limited space of acceptable futures in which humans enjoy sufficient well-being and avoid crossing planetary boundaries. A critical obstacle...

Changes to climate–carbon cycle feedbacks may significantly affect the Earth system's response to greenhouse gas emissions. These feedbacks are usually analysed from numerical output of complex and arguably opaque Earth system models. Here, we construct a stylised global climate–carbon cycle model, test its output against comprehensive Earth system...

Infrastructure development is central to the processes that abate and produce vulnerabilities in cities. Urban actors, especially those with power and authority, perceive and interpret vulnerability and decide when and how to adapt. When city managers use infrastructure to reduce urban risk in the complex, interconnected city system, new fragilitie...

Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Most studies have either focused on qualitative approaches to discuss th...

Changes to climate-carbon cycle feedbacks may significantly affect the Earth System’s response to greenhouse gas emissions. These feedbacks are usually analysed from numerical output of complex and arguably opaque Earth System Models (ESMs). Here, we construct a stylized global climate-carbon cycle model, test its output against complex ESMs, and i...

The resource management and environmental policy literature focuses on devising regulations and incentive structures to achieve desirable goals. It often presumes the existence of public infrastructure that actualizes these incentives and regulations through a process loosely referred to as ‘governance.’ In many cases, it is not clear if and how su...

Nonequilibrium ecology and resilience theory have transformed rangeland ecology and management by challenging the traditional assumptions of ecological stability and linear successional dynamics. These alternative interpretations indicate that ecosystem dynamics are strongly influenced by disturbance, heterogeneity, and existence of multiple stable...

Tradeoffs make win-win scenarios difficult to achieve in social-ecological systems (SES). But it is one thing to recognize that tradeoffs make win-wins difficult to achieve and quite another to understand the interaction of factors in social-ecological systems that generate tradeoffs, and the kinds of tradeoffs that may preclude win-wins. In this p...

The planetary boundary framework constitutes an opportunity for decision makers to define climate policy through the lens of adaptive governance. Here, we use the DICE model to analyze the set of adaptive climate policies that comply with the two planetary boundaries related to climate change: (1) staying below a CO2 concentration of 550 ppm until...

Significance Smallholder farmers make a significant contribution to food security in developing countries. Those farmer communities are experiencing new challenges owing to integration with the broader economy (increasing price volatility) and climate change (increasing frequency of extreme weather events). Our study aimed to understand how smallho...

Climate change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, and other global challenges pose major collective action problems: A group benefits from a certain action, but no individual has sufficient incentive to act alone. Formal institutions, e.g., laws and treaties, have helped address issues like ozone depletion, lead pollution, and acid rain. Ho...

Institutions, the rules of the game that shape repeated human interactions, clearly play a critical role in helping groups avoid the inefficient use of shared resources such as fisheries, freshwater, and the assimilative capacity of the environment. Institutions, however, are intimately intertwined with the human, social, and biophysical context wi...

On-going efforts to understand the dynamics of coupled social-ecological (or more broadly, coupled infrastructure) systems and common pool resources have led to the generation of numerous datasets based on a large number of case studies. This data has facilitated the identification of important factors and fundamental principles which increase our...

Large-N comparative studies have helped common pool resource scholars gain general insights into the factors that influence collective action and governance outcomes. However, these studies are often limited by missing data, and suffer from the methodological limitation that important information is lost when we reduce textual information to quanti...

Governing common pool resources (CPR) in the face of disturbances such as globalization and climate change is challenging. The outcome of any CPR governance regime is the influenced by local combinations of social, institutional, and biophysical factors, as well as cross-scale interdependencies. In this study, we take a step towards understanding m...

Improving the adaptive capacity of small-scale irrigation systems to the impacts of climate change is crucial for food security in Asia. This study analyzes the capacity of small-scale irrigation systems dependent on the Asian monsoon to adapt to variability in river discharge caused by climate change. Our study is motivated by the Pumpa irrigation...

Climate change and its interactions with complex socioeconomic dynamics dictate the need for decision makers to move from incremental adaptation toward transformation as societies try to cope with unprecedented and uncertain change. Developing pathways toward transformation is especially difficult in regions with multiple contested resource uses an...

https://sustainingthecommons.asu.edu/

Developing effective governance structures for the fair and sustainable use of benefits that flow from shared natural resources is arguably one of the defining challenges of our time. Addressing this challenge has been extremely difficult because the associated governance problem is multifaceted and multilayered. Governance structures must address...

Significance Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interdisciplinary research on social−ecological systems (SESs), which has typically viewed SESs as self-organized systems. This view, however, may be incomplete in that many modern SESs are in fact part designed and part self-organized, i.e., the coupled processes in most SESs are mediated by...

Social roles are thought to play an important role in determining the capacity for collective action in a community regarding the use of shared resources. Here we report on the results of a study using a behavioral experimental approach regarding the relationship between social roles and the performance of social-ecological systems. The computer-ba...

When governing shared resources, the level and quality of information available to resource users on the actions of others and the state of the environment may have a critical effect on the performance of groups. In the work presented here, we find that lower availability of information does not affect the average performance of the group in terms...

The evolution of agricultural economies requires two processes: 1) the domestication of plants and 2) specialization in agricultural practices at the expense of alternative subsistence pursuits. Yet, in the literature, domestication receives the lion's share of attention while theories of specialization lag behind. In this paper, we integrate ideas...

Most studies on the response of socioeconomic systems to a sudden shift focus on long-term equilibria or end points. Such narrow focus forgoes many valuable insights. Here we examine the transient dynamics of regime shift on a divided population, exemplified by societies divided ideologically, politically, economically, or technologically. Replicat...

Previous statistical analyses of Elinor Ostroms design principles have demonstrated that they have some predictive capacity to explain successful self-governance and CPR management regimes. But their implementation does not ensure success in multiple dimensions. Critiques have shown that there are important contexts and contingencies that these pri...

The prospect of unprecedented environmental change, combined with increasing demand on limited resources, demands adaptive responses at multiple levels. In this article, we analyze different attributes of farm-level capacity in central Arizona, USA, in relation to farmers’ responses to recent dynamism in commodity and land markets, and the institut...

This book synthesizes and reviews the evidence in support of seven generic principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services, i.e. the capacity of a social–ecological system to sustain a desired set of ecosystem services in the face of disturbance and ongoing change. Although some principles are better established than others, there is...

The social–ecological systems that provide ecosystem services to society can be viewed as complex adaptive systems (CAS), characterized by a high level of interconnectedness, potential for non-linear change, and inherent uncertainty and surprise. This chapter focuses on whether resilience of ecosystem services is enhanced by management based on wha...

Environmental problems, at local scale as well as global scale, are now considered as key issues and scientists are encouraged to be part of the process to address these issues. For the last decades, scholars have been focusing on the study of interactions between social dynamics and ecological processes and produced a set of concepts and scientifi...