Dynamics

Overview

Dynamism, uncertainty and complexity dominate today’s world. Yet many policy interventions ignore this, and so often fail. What is missing is a rigorous and systematic approach to addressing dynamics, one that encompasses an understanding of complex system dynamics and provides a useable guide to action.

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Explainer: Dynamics

• Addressing how interlinked processes of social, technological and environmental change operate in different settings, and how different groups frame these.

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Long-term stresses, short-term shocks

Contemporary dynamics range from long-term stresses such as the cumulative build-up of water scarcity, to short term shocks such as those associated with a sudden drought. They revolve around hierarchies of scale, from local crop-soil interactions in a farmer's field to global climatic shifts.As varying rates of change across overlapping scales interact, complex non-linear systems dynamics are emerging, with different thresholds and tipping points.

STEPS is exploring the interaction of environmental, technological and social changes under such conditions of incertitude, how different people and institutions prioritise, anticipate and imagine environmental and technological options, and the implications of these for pathways to sustainability.

STEPS work on Dynamics:

• Interdisciplinary theory: An empirically-grounded interdisciplinary theorisation of the dynamics of environmental/ecological, social/political/economic and scientific/technological systems.
• • Identification of pathways: The identification of (dominant and more hidden) pathways of longer-term socio-technical and environmental change in each of the three domains, specifying the sustainability implications for different localities and social groups.
• • Expectations and aspirations: An empirically-grounded understanding across domains and multiple sites of the expectations and aspirations of technological and environmental scenarios held by different groups of poor people, elites, scientists and policy-makers, and of the knowledge and information sources that guide their interpretations.
• • Perspectives: Novel integrated perspectives on adaptation, precaution, resilience, diversity and sustainability which put systems dynamics, power and politics centre-stage.
  

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Working Paper 1: Dynamic Systems

• Dynamic Systems and the Challenge of Sustainability (pdf 861kb)
  By Ian Scoones, Melissa Leach, Adrian Smith, Sigrid Stagl, Andy Stirling, John Thompson
  
  Dynamism, uncertainty and complexity dominate today's world, yet many policies ignore this and so fail. What is missing is a rigorous and systematic approach to addressing dynamics, one that encompasses an understanding of complex systems dynamics and provides a useable guide to action.

• Order a copy of paper from the IDS bookshop, cost £5.00 per paper or order the set of seven STEPS titles for £20.00
• Read a summary of this paper

This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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STEPS briefing 1: Dynamic systems and development challenges

Ian Scoones
Download this briefing (pdf 320kb)

 

 

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Research Projects: cutting across domains & themes

• Crop, disease and innovation in Africa - focussing on dryland Kenya, maize and farming system dynamics in areas affected by climate change.
• Urbanisation in Asia - urbanisation and sustainability in Asia's growing cities, on the expanding peri-urban fringe of a major city, indicative of conditions for an increasing proportion of global poor.
• Rethinking regulation -addressing the gap between current assumptions about regulation in the cases of drugs, seeds and water in China and Latin America, and more complex realities.
• Risk, uncertainty and technology - how different institutions and groups frame and respond to risks and uncertainties in areas of rapid scientific and technological advance.
• Epidemics, livelihoods and politics - HIV-AIDS, SARS, avian flu, BSE - procedures for addressing epidemics that support rather than compromise poor people and support social justice.

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Related research & events

• 'The Dynamics of Sustainability - durability, stability, resilience and robustness'. View this presentation given by Andy Stirling, STEPS co-director in November 2008
• Participation, power and progress in the social appraisal of technology - by STEPS co-director Andy Stirling
• Reframing Resilience The STEPS Centre's theme this year is resilience; engaging with resilience thinking and exploring practical implications for policy in agriculture, water, peri-urban dynamics, epidemics and regulation.
• Knowledge, power and politics in environment and development. STEPS director Melissa Leach gave this year's Linacre Lecture at Oxford University. She explored how and why policy approaches to environment and development problems conflict with user knowledge and argues for alternative approaches taking human-ecological dynamics seriously.

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