 In this module, we'll be talking about adaptive capacity, the capacity of the social system of any kind from whole societies to individuals to deal with change within their environment. This question of social adaptation becomes increasingly significant when social change affects important aspects of life over comparatively short periods of time. Such changes might include migration, changes in age, rapid industrial development or major shifts of the population from rural to urban living that has been characteristic of the modern era. In such times of rapid and fundamental social change, it is the adaptive capacity of the social system that ensures the preservation of its structure and functionality over time. And this question of what enables or constrains the system's adaptive capacity becomes of central interest. As we've discussed in previous modules, agents operate within some environment, they are periodically subject to change within that environment. They have to deal with this change in some way in order to ensure the preservation of their structure and function and their capacity to do that we would call their robustness or resilience. The question we're interested in then is how do they respond to that change? What strategy does the agent or organization use? And there are fundamentally really just two different approaches to dealing with change of this kind. Agents can resist it or they can adapt to it. And of course most eventualities will involve some combination of both but we need to understand these two different paradigms of resistance and adaptation. And in this module we'll be using models from the area of cybernetics to help us do this. Adaptive systems typically have a specialized subsystem for regulating their behavior and this is called a regulatory or control system. Examples of this would include the human brain, the border directors within a company, a national government or a military commander among many others. Regulatory systems are designed to manage the overall maintenance of the system's structure and functionality to ensure preservation and homeostasis. All complex adaptive systems are in some way dependent upon their environment. They are what we call thermodynamically open systems. They require the input of energy and resources in order to maintain their dynamical stage. Without it they will slowly or rapidly decay and thus the regulatory system has to ensure that the system as a whole is and will be receiving the required input values from its environment. The regulatory system then has to know what the parameters to these input values are and direct the system towards a state that will optimize them. If we are cold and there is a fire nearby we will move towards it. If we are very poor we will be driven to make money. If our economy requires a high input of oil we will try to secure that resource. These are examples of homeostasis where the regulatory system monitors, controls and adjust the whole system so as to maintain it within the optimal set of input values required to preserve and develop its level of structure and functionality and this is the same for all complex adaptive systems. Regulatory systems always define a desired state for the system and parameters or boundaries around that that are required for it to achieve that desired state. Here we are defining what the system is, that is to say there is some structure or function through which it defines itself. This might be the identity of being an Indian, of being a good person or being an athlete or being a tough guy. But in order to be any of these things you have to stay within a certain set of parameters. You can't be a good person if you are taking lots of drugs and stealing lots of things. You can't be a tough guy and go around wearing pink flowery shirts all the time. All of these identities are dependent upon a set of boundary conditions that must be maintained in order to maintain that state of functionality. In order to occupy that state you are dependent upon those input values. When we as groups or individuals form an identity it defines what we are. This identity also typically depends upon some resource. Such as the territory that a nation occupies, the job status that an individual occupies or the position within some social hierarchy. In defining what we are, we are of course also defining what we're not. We are creating some kind of boundary condition that limits our existence. These dependencies and boundary conditions create a structure that holds the system within a certain configuration creating inertia and the resistance to change. The formation of identity and boundaries is often path dependent with negative externalities that create the lock-in effect. The emergence of the structure may have been initially contingent with other directions being equally feasible in the early stage. But once the structure is in place it can be self-perpetuating creating its own conditions for persistence. Think about the carving up of the Middle East by the colonial powers after the Second World War by drawing often arbitrary lines in the sand. But these lines in the sand would now be considered semi-sacred, trying now to move them just a few kilometers could possibly result in a Third World War. Once contingent historical events take place, path dependent sequences are marked by relatively deterministic causal patterns or what can be thought of as inertia. And this inertia is driven by the same process that we discussed before. Negative feedback loops making it easier to continue with the same pre-existing solution and negative externalities reducing alternative options and out of this the boundary condition gets self-perpetuated and reinforced over time. Once the adaptive system has defined a boundary condition and become locked into that condition we will get in inertia the resistance to change. This as a strategy means the control system trying to limit the number of possible eventualities and maintain only a limited number of responses. In order to reduce the number of possible eventualities to some small subset that is conducive to the system we have to try and control the environment. Further we go down this path of resistance the more we're trying to control the environment and the more we're trying to reduce the possible input values to the system. In order to properly control a system or environment we have to linearize it. Non-linearity is inherently uncontrollable. We have to externalize it from the system in so doing reducing diversity, reducing redundant components and by linearizing the environment we can increase the coupling. All of these will give increases in short-term efficiency but also of course leads to the long-term self-organized criticality as the system becomes more dependent upon a narrow band of input values and any small change in those critical values can create systemic shocks. The classical example of this being our current dependency on petroleum where small changes in the input value can ramify across the whole system and here again this critical state was created by path dependence, a process driven by positive feedback and negative externalities as we previously saw when we talked about carbon lock-in. But this state of inertia reduces the system's adaptive capacity and requires the heavy maintenance of a control system in order to ensure that these critical values are not altered. We've already defined adaptation as the capacity to generate some appropriate response given some environmental change. Adaptation as a strategy is essentially the opposite from resistance and control. Both resistance and adaptation are methods for maintaining the system structure and functionality but control does so by reducing the number of input values to the system to the required type by creating boundaries and exerting some external force to alter the environment whereas adaptation tries to ensure that the system has the appropriate response for any given input value. Adaptation means being open to a number of different eventualities that is to say the condition of uncertainty and having the capacity to reconfigure the system in response to that change without compromising critical functions. Whereas regulatory systems will have to expend a large amount of their resources on maintaining their whole mechanism for regulation that is to say the means through which they amass information define and protect boundaries, exercise control etc. Adaptation as a strategy in contrary is not trying to reduce the range of input values thus it does not mean to maintain all of this control apparatus meaning it can be a much more agile strategy. This strategy of adaptation is then focused on ensuring the system has a sufficient number of states to generate the appropriate one when required and ensuring the competency of these components. Whereas resistance will try to remove all disturbances adaptation comes with the recognition to the importance of disturbance in testing the system in order to maintain the competency of the system's components because without control over its environment the diversity and effectiveness of its constituent components is the only thing that is going to ensure its preservation. As an example of this we might think about the different philosophies surrounding child rearing. On the one hand we'll have those parents who believe that it is best to try and protect their children from every eventuality giving them all the vaccines not letting them play in the garden and get dirty, talk to the bad children or stay out late. On the other hand we have parents who believe it's necessary to expose the child to those environmental perturbations in order for it to develop its adaptive capacity through overcoming them. This is of course how our bodies develop their adaptive capacity the human immune system develops by encountering interventions from antigens having to develop the appropriate response and then retaining a copy of those successful responses for future application. In so doing it uses these environmental perturbations to build up resilience over time. And this whole discussion ties back to the previous module where we talked about the theory of the edge of chaos. The hypotheses that successful complex adaptive systems somehow maintain themselves between chaos or randomness and order where they are exposed to perturbations that broaden their possible set of input values and remove those components that do not add to its overall adaptive capacity. The system uses the two different regimes in order to configure and reconfigure itself enabling it to evolve over time in a sustainable fashion. Because of emergence complex adaptive systems like whole societies are multi-dimensional or multi-scalar systems. Through emergence patterns develop on different levels and these patterns have their own internal processes taking place. This means that change is occurring on many different levels from the micro to the macro and these processes of change are taking place in parallel with small processes nested within larger ones. For example within Western society during the past 500 years we've been going through the macro process of change that is modernity representing a very fundamental socio-cultural transformation. But nested within that we've also been going through the process of industrialization for the past 200 years approximately and within both of these we have the process of economic liberalization that's been taking place for the past 30 years or so. Thus in these complex social systems there are many processes of change taking place in parallel. These macro processes of change typically take place very slowly. Within ecology these are called slow variables. Micro level processes of change happen very fast and they have fast variables associated with them. Fast variables are factors that change rapidly and are most easily measured and manipulated by managers. Regulatory systems can try to directly influence and manage the system through these fast variables such as a central bank reducing interest rates or putting liquidity into the market in order to affect the state of the system immediately. But we typically cannot use centralized regulatory systems to manage macro processes of change. There is no government to the process of modernity. There is no board of directors to the process of globalization. These things are managed through the mechanism of evolution that takes place in a distributed fashion over prolonged periods of time. There is no centralized regulatory system that can really affect these slow variables. If the macro system has self-organized into a critical state there is nothing we can do about that now. You cannot now affect this macro situation and the slow variables associated with it by altering fast variables. The possibility for solving that problem was in the past. Here again we see path dependency and again most of this can be understood in terms of positive feedback and negative externalities. These stresses on the macro level accumulate because some regulatory system on the macro level has learned to displace a lot of its problems to its external environment. Quite simply it pushes them beyond its boundaries. But it is really just pushing them onto the macro level distorting the process of evolution and leading to macro level self-organized criticality that it cannot affect through its fast control variables on the macro level. The system might become increasingly competent at managing everything within its boundaries but through linearization and externalizing those things that it can't manage well. And the big idea here is that of sustainability which we haven't had the chance to touch upon but we might say is the ultimate aim of adaptive capacity. In this module we've been discussing adaptive capacity and resilience within social systems. We talked about two different strategies for trying to manage change, resistance and adaptation. Their resistance involves developing some static identity based upon a boundary condition and creating a regulatory system for monitoring and controlling the system's environment to ensure a limited subset of eventualities that are conducive to the system's self-preservation and continued functioning, what is called homeostasis. This is done by amassing as much resources as possible in order to be able to exert as much control as necessary to resist any perturbation that might take it outside of these operating parameters. Inversely we talked about adaptation as a second alternative strategy, one that is focused upon systems capacity to generate a wide set of responses, ensuring its capacity to reconfigure itself given as wide a spectrum of input values as possible, in so doing ensuring its resilience and continued functionality. We talked about how the adaptive approach is not focused on amassing resources in order to prevent change but instead on generating the appropriate response and fast recovery from inevitable failures, thus responding to change in a constructive way as an important means through which it develops. Finally, we discussed the multidimensional nature to complex social systems as they're engaged in processes of change on various levels from the micro to the macro, giving us slow and fast variables, with these fast variables being the means of centralized regulation and slow variables being the outcome to the long-term process of evolution.