Islands of Order J. Stephen Lansing Complexity Institute, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract: Not long ago, both ecology and social science were organized around ideas of stability. This view has changed in ecology, where nonlinear change is increasingly seen as normal, but not (yet) in social science. This talk focuses on transitions between low-dimension “islands of order” in coupled social-ecological systems. Such transitions are not detectible under equilibrium assumptions- they look like noise- and may have important implications for governance.