The Necessity of Complexity: Taking environmental-conflict research beyond mechanism

The Necessity of Complexity: Taking environmental-conflict research beyond mechanism
Tom Deligiannis, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Dirk Druet

The authors argue that there is a deep divide between qualitative and quantitative (as I took it) researchers regarding violence and environmental scarcity. The quants argue that there is little correlation between scarcity and violence, while the quals think case studies show clear causal relationships. Enter complexity science: "A mechanistic ontology is entirely inappropriate for investigation of causal processes within socio-ecological systems, because these systems are fundamentally "complex." Recent advances in complexity theory show that such systems are characterized by causal openness, emergent properties, disproportionality of cause and effect (i.e., nonlinear behavior), fractal scaling, and causal interaction (synergy)." They argue that a complexity approach reveals a number of the missing nonlinear causal connections between violence and scarcity.

The paper makes it incredibly obvious that there is a lot of controversy over the topic. Much of it is laid at the creation of variables for abstract concepts (How the heck do you quantify environmental scarcity? asks one research. Like this! says another. That's stupid. says the first researcher. So it goes...). Of course the debate is far more nuanced than this paper could even elaborate, but that's not the point. What we want to know is what a complexity perspective can give to this debate.

The most powerful element of complexity theory, according to the authors, is its ability to reframe causality. The authors take issue with the idea of 'if X occurs then Y occurs' and suggest that multiple causes can act together to produce an effect. The idea is that environmental scarcity can cause conflict, but it is not necessary and sufficient to cause conflict - I think that is obvious, but it appear the authors are criticizing other researchers who pose a strawman of cause-and-effect ideas about environmental scarcity.

They use a case study of community unrest in Peru to illustrate this idea. I feel that I couldn't quite summarize the list of causal relationships that lead to the violence in the region. There was a mixture of migration, lack of government legitimacy, environmental scarcity, over-population, and heterogeneity. One thing causes another which amplifies something else, which aggravates the first thing, and *pow* avalanche! For instance migration from one area to another might mean that the new area is not equipped to handle the new population resulting in lack of water, land, and food. Scarcity is a problem, but overpopulation is a problem in and of itself - and both together is a bigger problem than either in isolation.

I feel this paper dressed up pre-existing ideas about causality with a complexity veneer. While complexity science really does bring a lot of explanatory power to complex social situations, the author's use of it in this context seemed superficial. Well, at least in places. I think the application to a review of causality, using complexity science for legitimation, was effective. But there probably was little need of injecting unnecessary complexity jargon words into the discussion. Plus there was not very much illustration of what exactly complexity science and it's corresponding theories have done and truly can do. I agree, complexity is a necessary consideration, but I don't think someone who wasn't already convinced of that would buy into it from this paper.