Program & Abstracts Making Liveable, Sustainable Systems Unremarkable 53rd Meeting of The International Society for the Systems Sciences July 12-17, 2009 The University of Queensland Brisbane, Australia Hosted by The School of Integrative Systems and ANZSYS Timothy FH Allen President Co-Sponsors & Affiliated Organizations The following organizations have provided various levels of support for the ISSS 2008 conference. All have agreed to publicize the conference through their institutional networks. In addition, those so designated have provided either financial or in-kind support through participation in conference planning and facilitation. ANZSYS Australian and New Zealand Systems Society Table of Contents List of Sponsors and Affiliated Organizations ...........................................Inner front cover Welcome Message, Professor T F H Allen, ISSS President............................................. 3 Conference Schedule ....................................................................................................... 7 Plenary Speakers Biographies........................................................................................ 21 Plenary Abstracts............................................................................................................ 31 Workshop Abstracts........................................................................................................ 39 Abstracts Index ............................................................................................................... 45 Paper Abstracts .............................................................................................................. 51 Poster Abstracts............................................................................................................ 109 Author Index ….. .......................................................................................................... 125 Keywords Index ............................................................................................................ 129 Brisbane St Lucia Campus Map .............................................................. Inner back cover 1 2 Welcome ISSS 2009 There have been towering figures of our discourse, and some have created or at least led some great institutions of systems science. These great figures notwithstanding, there are remarkably few institutions in systems science that have proven to be stable and robust enough to outlive their creators for long. Deans step in and dismantle what they do not understand, taking the money for their discipline-centred favourites. Perhaps the University of Florida, Gainesville will have the wisdom to continue the thrust of H. T. Odum, but these are early days after our having lost his personal presence. But then to give the lie to the fragility of systems programs stands the University of Queensland, Brisbane, the setting of our upcoming meeting. Is it something in the water of Northern Australia? Or is it the great demand from businesses and a “dry-continent-society” under climate change that makes Australia systems sympathetic? Anyway Queensland is a great centre for systems sciences. Better than that, it appears robust. While we do have our own distinctive systems scientists in Ockie Bosch and Kambiz Maani playing critical roles, the whole systems effort in Queensland is wonderfully broad across the University. The systems leaders in Queensland of this generation will surely have a legacy to leave behind, in contrast to other programs that have proven to be fragile when the founders retire. In Brisbane there is a full set of energetic systems scientists running a broad curriculum of excellence in the field. I see here a set of schools and a university at large pressing forward on general system thinking on a broad front. Deans and administrative leaders will welcome us and have sagely supported the effort of our members as they planned a great meeting. Our thanks go out to our hosts. Systems education has always had its place, but let’s give it a big push this time. We need global systems thinking to be normal, so that each local spot on the planet is not blindsided by unexpected global information. The stability and sheer size of the systems movement in Queensland is important in principle, and for the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I am not alone in feeling I have been waiting for the systems movement to occupy its proper central role in both planning and normal science. Somehow we systems people are odd ducks, respected but often kept at the margins. We on the inside know how important and distinctive is the systems approach. One only has to read the Presidential Address of my personal hero, Robert Rosen, where he says that systems thinking rises above paradigms to be something more substantial than a mere point of view or disciplinary posture. We have a session at our meeting on Rosenian modelling relations. Robert Rosen was a great teacher on which we might model ourselves. The time often appears right for systems thinking but then it turns out we still have to wait. And that is whence comes the notion of “unremarkable” in the meeting title. Queensland may just be that beachhead from which systems thinking can break out, so that it is taken for granted, normal, indeed unremarkable. It will be remarkable indeed if we can achieve that. In Queensland systems thinking is unremarkable, it is the normal thing to do; other places must follow. Joe Tainter wrote recently of Epirus in Greece and the Rio Grande Valley, on two continents a couple of hundred years apart. He shows an eerie parallel between the detail of the local collapses of both places because of information coming at them from outside their respective local worlds. He saw parallels in stunning detail in the change in both places from self-sufficient subsistent peasantry to unemployment in a tourist economy. The 3 common cause for the unfortunate twin outcomes was the intrusion of new information from outside. At the end of his paper, Tainter suggested that all parts of contemporary humanity from the First to the Third World face similar predicaments. The economic meltdown of the world economy was a complete surprise to United States where it started, and everywhere else has been hit just as hard. Tainter’s solution is global systems thinking, which he says can only be achieved by education from a very early age. Only in that way can humans come to see global systems thinking as unremarkable. Tainter's choice of the word "unremarkable" stimulated me to include it in the theme for the meeting over which I will preside. We all live somewhere locally, with particular problems, cultures and resources, but we all also live in a whole world that is undergoing huge change. To equip those who will run things in a quarter of a century it would be very helpful to teach them now while they are young global systems thinking. Put it in the first grade curriculum. To be fair, the recycling movement in the US has come significantly from kids coming home from school and shaming their parents with what school has taught them, so we have a start. Let’s get them to find systems thinking unremarkable. We want them to say incredulously, “Global systems, of course, what else?” The other theme of our meeting is cutting edge. It focuses on sustainability and livability, a double stage launch into the future. That theme addresses an issue that has been central to my own development as a system scientist: scale. Scale is the issue at the centre of hierarchy theory, my own passion. We cannot get to a planned rational future without both long and short term perspectives. In the end it is a grand vision of a happy long term for our planet and ourselves. But we cannot get there without going through a series of local times with people in them. The unfolding long plan must always be acceptable, or better still embraced, by the people who must live at that time while planning for their respective futures. In the realm of livability human values keep changing, but must be continually met, their transience notwithstanding. The path to sustainability must pass through all of the differently valued livabilities until over the long term a desired sustainable outcome is achieved. As the values for what is livable change, sometimes they must include accepting what might have been seen as unacceptable and a failure in the past, but is in the respective present the best realistic outcome. It took gasoline prices to double in months for livability in the United States to include rejecting SUVs and trucks. The change in values was reflected in sales of those vehicles as they plummeted. The price of a second hand Cadillac is so low now that an opportunist might buy one and pay the higher fuel prices. So the dual issues of sustainability and livability together are very much a complex systems issue that invokes more than one level of analysis. There is plenty for systems theorists and practitioner to bite on. There is always the tussle in ISSS between those who embrace an ontology of what systems really are as opposed to those who insist on a constructed epistemology where values are at the forefront and what is ultimately real is moot. With the latter point of view, I am postmodern or at least post-normal myself, and that position is important when addressing sustainability. While we cannot sustain impossible material situations, sustainability is not a material issue. There will be a material something in the end, but it is the values