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- All Subjects: Climate Change
Description
Sustainability depends in part on our capacity to resolve dilemmas of the commons in Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS). Thus, we need to know more about how to incentivize individuals to take collective action to manage shared resources. Moreover, given that we will experience new and more extreme weather events due to climate change, we need to learn how to increase the robustness of CIS to those shocks. This dissertation studies irrigation systems to contribute to the development of an empirically based theory of commons governance for robust systems. I first studied the eight institutional design principles (DPs) for long enduring systems of shared resources that the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom proposed in 1990. I performed a critical literature review of 64 studies that looked at the institutional configuration of CIS, and based on my findings I propose some modifications of their definitions and application in research and policy making. I then studied how the revisited design principles, when analyzed conjointly with biophysical and ethnographic characteristics of CISs, perform to avoid over-appropriation, poverty and critical conflicts among users of an irrigation system. After carrying out a meta-analysis of 28 cases around the world, I found that particular combinations of those variables related to population size, countries corruption, the condition of water storage, monitoring of users behavior, and involving users in the decision making process for the commons governance, were sufficient to obtain the desired outcomes. The two last studies were based on the Peruvian Piura Basin, a CIS that has been exposed to environmental shocks for decades. I used secondary and primary data to carry out a longitudinal study using as guidance the robustness framework, and different hypothesis from prominent collapse theories to draw potential explanations. I then developed a dynamic model that shows how at the current situation it is more effective to invest in rules enforcement than in the improvement of the physical infrastructure (e.g. reservoir). Finally, I explored different strategies to increase the robustness of the system, through enabling collective action in the Basin.
ContributorsRubinos, Cathy (Author) / Anderies, John M (Thesis advisor) / Abbott, Joshua K (Committee member) / Janssen, Marcus A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Population growth, social interaction, and environmental variability are interrelated facets of the same complex system. Tracing the flow of food, water, information, and energy within these social-ecological systems is essential for understanding their long-term behavior. Leveraging an archaeological perspective of how past societies coevolved with their natural environments will be critical to anticipating the impact of impending climate change on farming communities in the developing world. However, there is currently a lack of formal, quantitative theory rooted in first principles of human behavior that can predict the empirical regularities of the archaeological record in semiarid regions. Through a series of models -- statistical, computational, and mathematical -- and empirical data from two long-term archaeological case studies in the pre-Hispanic American Southwest and Roman North Africa, I explore the feedbacks between population growth and social interaction in water-limited agrarian societies. First, I use a statistical model to analyze a database of 7.5 million artifacts collected from nearly 500 archaeological sites in the Southwest and found that sites located in different climatic zones were more likely to interact with one another than a sites occupying the same zone. Next, I develop a computational model of demography and food production in ancient agrarian societies and, using North Africa as a motivating example, show how the concrete actions and interactions of millions of individual people lead to emergent patterns of population growth and stability. Finally, I build a simple mathematical model of trade and migration among agricultural settlements to determine how the relative costs and benefits of social interaction drive population growth and shape long-term settlement patterns. Together, these studies form the foundation for a unified quantitative approach to regional social-ecological systems. By combining theory and methods from ecology, geography, and climate science, archaeologists can better leverage insights from diverse times and places to fill critical knowledge gaps in the study of food security and sustainability in the drylands of today.
ContributorsGauthier, Nicolas (Author) / Barton, C Michael (Thesis advisor) / Anderies, John M (Committee member) / Peeples, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019