Events

The KLI support international groups of scholars in the life and sustainability sciences working on interdisciplinary projects to conduct their groundbreaking research at the institute.  KLI Focus Groups and Working Groups aim to develop ideas on a particular subject and generate suggestions for action. The participants have different scientific backgrounds and strive to develop specific, practical goals.  Focus Groups are one-time meetings gathering and working together at the KLI for a period of one to maximum two weeks. Working Groups comprise 3 meetings over the course of one year and a half.

Event Details

Working Group
Working Groups & Focus Groups
Evolutionary Theories for Social-Ecological Change: Third meeting
Tim Waring & Maja Schlüter
2023-04-17 12:00 - 2023-04-21 12:00
KLI
Organized by Tim Waring & Maja Schlüter
Our working group aims to connect the domains of evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems change to improve our collective ability to understand and influence the complex processes of change in social-ecological systems for the better. Our working group has been very successful. The first meeting was a wide ranging exploration of the intellectual and disciplinary challenges of bringing the two domains closer together. The second meeting refined that work and produced a research paper now in revision at Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, which maps the conceptual connections between evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems (SES) change and builds motivation for using evolutionary theory in studying SES change.
 
Our third and final meeting of the working group will take the next step in integrating evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems change. Specifically, we will develop a small set of follow-on projects focused on more specific applications of evolutionary methods, theory for understanding social-ecological systems change, each to become a separate output. Current work includes a mathematical and simulation model of a classic SES model on poverty traps, rebuilt to include cultural evolution of human behavior. A second emerging project includes a synthetic approach to understanding the evolution of social-ecological systems in a holistic fashion. We are excited to share the outcomes of our working group. We hope they will be of use in both the SES and sustainability sciences and the evolutionary sciences.