“Good governance” is a poorly defined and idealistic concept that could mean that the governance process is good or that its outcomes are good. International institutions have not effectively mitigated climate change or other global environmental dangers, reduced inequality, or increased aid to poor countries. Because environment changes and economic and social globalization increasingly threaten poor communities everywhere, it is vital to clarify what constitutes good governance.

In a world of change, only resilient communities survive and prosper. In ecosystems resilience is the ability to maintain the basic structure essential to continue to produce natural goods demanded by humans. For social systems resilience is a measure of a community’s ability to cope with change in its environment without losing its core functions as a community. In this research good governance is defined as governance processes that increase resilience.

Rich countries have a wide range of adaptive tools including physical and human capital, technology and effective formal and informal institutions. For poor communities lacking in physical, financial, and technological resources institutional adaptation often is their only choice. Good governance – institutional arrangements that increase resilience - is critical to their survival.

How can nations and communities use institutions to adapt to global changes? What institutional arrangements increase resilience? This research addresses these puzzles by building a descriptive agent-based model (ABM) of the role of institutions in national and local community resilience, elaborating it through study of selected case studies, testing it with indicators of selected institutional characteristics, and creating a computer-based simulation of good governance: resilience through institutions.

Overview of Research Design

This research’s central thesis is that resilient communities are able to adapt to environmental change and, in the absence of the technological fixes used by the rich, institutional change is the sole means of adaptation available to poor countries and communities.

The research is designed in four phases. Because they model bottom-up processes, ABMs are particularly useful for assessing good governance in poor nations and communities. They conceptualize dynamic social systems using novel language and model them as complex and nonlinear with a focus on the rules that frame agent interactions which, in social systems, are institutions. Thus, the first phase develops a descriptive ABM of the role of institutions in an adaptive society. This phase will also define the measures of institutions and of resilience.

The second phase elaborates the ABM through study and analysis of selected case studies of community governance in developing countries to match theoretical concepts to empirically identified social institutions.

As the relationship between resilient systems and flexible and permissive institutions may be simulated through ABMs at any level of aggregation, phase 3 develops indicators for national and local level institutional types and community resilience. It further tests the proposition that international institutions matter by comparing changes in the character of international institutions with measures of global environmental change.

The fourth phase is designed to build a computer-based simulation of the relationship between generalized social rules and increasing social resilience in healthy ecosystems.

Neil E. Harrison, Sustainable Development Institute, NHarriso@uwyo.edu.