Larsen, Kelsey

The governance of shared resources by diverse groups underlies every key sustainability challenge in the modern world. Yet, researchers struggle to understand when and how the basic principles that foster the effective governance of shared resources in small groups can scale-up to large populations with diverse beliefs and interests. To help fill this knowledge gap, in this paper we propose an embedded Model of Adaptive Capacity (the eACM). The eACM synthesizes basic insights from resource economics, team dynamics, and the behavioral science of stress to advance our understanding of how the effective governance of shared resources emerges across scales. The eACM proposes that the adaptive capacity of groups depends on key feedbacks between the stress responses of individuals, the impact of stress on group cognition, and changes in the structure and availability of shared resources. Here, we build a computational model to investigate the consequences of these basic feedback dynamics. We find that convergence towards joint solutions increases the ability of groups to adapt to changing environments and manage common pool resources sustainably. However, the achievement of a joint solution depends on a narrow window of stress arousal, a group's ability to assess resources, and a group's ability to communicate and diffuse conflict effectively. These results generate hypotheses for future empirical studies of effective resource governance.