I led a NIAS seminar on March 12, 2015, on modeling a complex adaptive system, in which I focused on the methodology of building simple models of complex systems. Here is the abstract: 

 

While open access to common-pool resources has been equated with a tragedy of the commons, we have found that mobile pastoralists in the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon are sustainably managing open access to common-pool grazing resources. We have described this pastoral system as a self-organizing Complex Adaptive System (CAS) in which mobile pastoralists distribute themselves over grazing resources in an ideal free distribution (IFD). In this seminar I will explain how we used an agent-based model (ABM) to examine how pastoralists are able to achieve an IFD. In addition, I will discuss what the advantages are of using ABMs to study social-ecological systems and other structure-agency problems.