Complex adaptive system

About: Complex adaptive system is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3190 publications have been published within this topic receiving 111947 citations. The topic is also known as: Complex adaptive system, CAS.

Complex adaptive systems for management of integrated care

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how a complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach can be used to promote the integration of health and social care for the benefit of the user.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a research review and a conceptual analysis of key issues identified in the growing literature on CAS. An application of the CAS approach to the field of integrated care is presented. The paper identifies crucial issues, notably: bringing together different providers and the place of the user as a co‐producer of care.Findings – The benefits of the CAS approach to integrated care are distilled. Above all CAS provides managers of health and social care with an alternative mindset. Guiding principles are offered to these managers to facilitate development towards a more integrated system of health and social care. The possibility to benefit from the user's own resources is increased when organizations are viewed from a CAS perspective. CAS promotes emergent ways of working.Practi...

Moving from traditional government to new adaptive governance: the changing face of food security responses in South Africa

Abstract: The food system faces increasing pressure from dynamic and interactive, environmental, political and socio-economic stressors. Tackling the complexity that arises from such interactions requires a new form of 'adaptive governance'. This paper provides a review of various conceptions of governance from a monocentric or politicotechnical understanding of governance through to adaptive governance that is based in complex adaptive systems theory. The review is grounded by a critique of the existing institutional structures responsible for food security in South Africa. The current Integrated Food Security Strategy and tasked governmental departments are not sufficiently flexible or coordinated to deal with an issue as multi-scalar and multidisciplinary as food security. However, actions taken in the non-governmental sector signal the emergence of a new type of governance. Apart from an increasing recognition of food security as an issue of concern in the country, there is also evidence of a changing governance structure including collaboration between diverse stakeholders. We review these governance trends with an understanding of the food system as a complex adaptive socio-ecological system where actors in the food system self-organize into more flexible networks that can better adapt to uncertain pressures.

Shifting perspectives on resource management: Resilience and the Reconceptualization of 'Natural Resources' and 'Management'

Abstract: Conventional notions of 'natural resources' and 'management' are problematic because of their history, and they need to be reconceptualised. The term 'resource' carries a sense of 'free goods', human-centric use and com - modification of nature; it can be revised to include the protection of ecosystem services for human well-being. The term 'management' implies domination of nature, efficiency, simplification, and expert-knows-best, command-and-control approaches. It similarly needs a makeover to emphasize stewardship, pluralism, collaboration, partnerships and adaptive governance, balancing efficiency objec - tives against ecological and social objectives. Resilience is a recurring theme in discussions of shifting perspectives in resource management, and I argue that it can be used as the basis of such a reconceptualization. The main elements of the resilience approach include attention to drivers and change processes, treating social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems characterized by cycles and uncertainty, and social systems and ecosystems as coupled and co-evolving. It is a good fit for contemporary resource management highlighting property rights, participation, interaction of institutions at multiple levels, and experimentation as in adaptive management and interactive governance.

Self-organization in Communicating Groups: The Emergence of Coordination, Shared References and Collective Intelligence

Abstract: Complex adaptive systems consist of a large number of interacting agents. Agents are goal-directed, cognitive individuals capable of perception, information processing and action. However, agents are intrinsically “bounded” in their rational understanding of the system they belong to, and its global organization tends to emerge from local interactions, resulting in a coordination of the agents and their actions. This coordination minimizes conflict or friction, while facilitating cooperation or synergy. The basic mechanism is the reinforcement of synergetic interactions and the suppression of conflictual ones. As a result, the system as a whole starts to behave like an integrated cognitive “superagent”. The author presents several examples of this process of spontaneous coordination that leads to distributed cognition, including the emergence of a shared vocabulary, the development of standard referential expressions, the evolution of transmitted ideas (memes) towards more stereotypical forms, and the aggregation of diverse experiences into collective decisions, in which the system as a whole is more intelligent than its individual components. These phenomena have been investigated by means of multi-agent computer simulations and social psychological experiments.