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The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Schwartz Foundation.
1.
Introduction
In the past century, environmental issues have become increasingly global in scale. Management solutions often urge us to 'think globally and act locally', based on the premise that global problems reflect the collective consequences of local actions (e.g., Geddes, 1915; Rockström et al., 2009). Individuals repeatedly ignore the social costs of their actions (Pigou, 1920), often because the people and organizations that act locally are at least somewhat removed from those who suffer the consequences. Making matters worse, negative changes tend to accumulate gradually in the broader social-ecological environment.
These problems are particularly difficult to address when the underlying social1and ecological systems are complex adaptive systems (Berkes and Folke, 1998). Each system consists of individual agents able to change, to learn from experience (or to change in relative abundance over evolutionary time) and to exploit their own selfish agendas. These agents compete for limited resources, leading to behaviors of exploitation, competition, parasitism and cooperation. To support these behaviors, distinct functional groups of players with complementary roles often emerge (Levin, 1999a, b).
In social-ecological systems, macroscopic properties emerge from local actions that spread to higher scales due to agents' collective behavior; these properties then feedback, influencing individuals' options and behaviors, but typically only do so diffusely and over much longer time scales. The possibilities of non-marginal changes, unobserved slow structural changes, spatial variation and strategic behavior are all examples of management and policy challenges related to the complex adaptive system properties of social-ecological systems.
Modeling these processes is difficult. General and analytical results are often unobtainable. However, empirical observations suggest that simple linear and reductionist dynamics give a misleading representation of how social-ecological systems work. Moreover, important features of complex adaptive systems must be studied and understood in an integrated way, because they all matter for the outcome of any management and policy intervention. Ignoring these characteristics might obscure crucial features that we observe in reality, like the risk of abrupt ecosystem changes, which can be difficult or even impossible to reverse. Nonlinear feedbacks along with slow processes help explain regime shifts in coral reefs, forests and lake systems (Scheffer, 2009). Hence, economic policies that do...