Many of societies’ most pressing social policy problems are wicked problems. While complex adaptive systems theory has been recognised as an appropriate way to address this type of problem, complexity-accepting strategies are difficult for public administrations because they are at odds with their current dominant logic. This paper describes the development and implementation of a diagnostic tool for tackling wicked problems that is underpinned by complex systems leadership theories and takes into account the current needs of government. The diagnostic tool was reasoned during a research project that investigated how best to increase the social impact of an active citizenship education program in the City of Onkaparinga, South Australia. The research project identified that while the program developed the active citizenship characteristics desired by the three levels of government in Australia, graduates from the program encountered systemic blocking factors when they attempted to put what they had learned during the program into practice. To increase the program’s impact, the diagnostic tool addresses these systemic blocking factors by focusing on nine leverage areas that enable systemic innovation and change to occur in communities.

The nature of China’s climate change dilemma is well-known: Climate change is exacerbating environmental devastation in China, but expanding mitigation efforts would pose new challenges to continuing economic development. National environmental measures often face strong resistance from sub-national authorities, which are incentivized by highly stable growth and development goals. This paper applies complexity theory to China’s climate change dilemma. Key insights of complexity theory—(i) the decisive role of systemic parameter settings (rule sets or minimum specifications) in shaping system behavior and (ii) the creative capacity of non-hierarchical organization—should encourage policy responses that reset incentives and harness creativity beyond government. Several instances are examined where incentive-focused, non-hierarchical initiatives have been effective in promoting climate-friendly behaviors. They include voluntary energy efficiency commitments undertaken by corporations, partnerships between local governments, clean-tech firms and international specialists, and ‘local issue-bundling’ to enlist public support for climate change mitigation.

This paper explores the question of whether people involved with a successful watershed policy initiative embraced and/or negated the complexity with which they worked. The setting was Lake Simcoe, in central Canada: an area important for fisheries, agriculture, tourism, recreation and citizens’ identities. Human activities had impacted water quality, and planned development posed further threats. Although government had supported considerable scientific data collection, citizens became frustrated by what they saw as a lack of regulatory and enforcement work. Citizens embarked on a range of creative pressure tactics for change. In early stages, citizens felt marginalized, but over time they were included in increasingly meaningful ways. This paper explores several complex system themes in interview transcripts, including initial starting conditions, attractors, and boundaries. A key finding is that citizens used scientific data as an attractor to enable their inclusion for a more complex range of agendas and benefits.

Electrical power networks can be improved both technically and economically through the inclusion of distributed generator (DG) units, which may include renewable energy resources. This work uses multi-objective optimization by evolutionary computing, with power flow calculations and multi-dimensional results analysis, to investigate a method of defining optimal deployment of DG units. The results indicate that the method used is a feasible one for designing deployment of DG units in terms of type, number, and location.

Critical regimes are present in all socio-technical systems. Usually, man-made systems are designed to avoid these regimes completely, and stay in a stable steady state to avoid uncertainty. However, complexity theory postulates that the edge of chaos, between order and disorder, provides highly interesting phenomena, such as emergence, which are important for the evolution of the system. In this paper we explore the edge of chaos through a concrete example in electrical energy systems. The exploration is done through simulation, which provides a valuable mean to perform massive experiments on large scale systems. The complexity residing at the edge is discussed, and external, system relevant and internal factors which are likely to shift this edge or drive the systems trajectory towards or away from it are introduced.

The paper looks at the potential for multi-utility service providers to create business models that compete with traditional utility product providers whereby customers’ services increase and resource efficiency is improved. The objective in our modeling is to show the how Multi-Utility Service Companies (MUSCos) could invade the market, changing it from markets focused on selling, for example, energy to customers, to markets aimed at selling efficiency. The output of our modeling is the extent to which the resource efficiency of UK homes can be significantly improved, and we show this in 10 centile categories. The key difference between the two types of providers (Traditional and MUSCo) is that while households can switch traditional suppliers fairly rapidly (3 months), if a household signs up to get house improvements and utilities from a particular MUSCo, then the arrangement will be at least 5 years, and possibly longer. This means that households, once they sign up are no longer ‘on the market’ for utility supply. Although getting a contract signed may take much more time for a salesman than simply getting a normal utility order, the fruits and the income are guaranteed to the MUSCo for 5 or 10 years. Their sales force efforts can be switched to non-contracted households. So, essentially both utilities and MUSCos are trying to sell to the normal, non-contracted households. The real advantage that a MUSCo customer is that there is a discount on both the house improvements offered and the price of future supplies of energy and water. MUSCos are able to offer reduced cost of house insulation, appliances which reduce consumption and waste from multiple utilities, and can achieve marginal profits from financing of these appliances.

As half of the world’s population live in cities today, the topic of urbanization and urban energy systems shift continuously into society’s focus. It has become a common challenge for local governments to provide a so called “Master Plan”, outlining a long term vision for the city’s energy infrastructure, to which all planners and investors have to adhere. Being a top-down approach, these Master plans are first of all politically motivated documents, which focus on achieving given targets, such as CO₂-emission reductions or higher shares of electric mobility. Originating from these targets, a set of milestones and measures is derived, e.g., the implementation of certain green technologies or refurbishments of buildings. The goal of this paper is to elaborate a model, which allows analysis of a Master Plan from a bottom-up perspective and thereby quantitatively assesses the plan with regards to its feasibility, while identifying possible bottlenecks in its implementation. The results can then serve the city planners to adapt their planning in order to avoid unforeseen problems, when putting the plan’s measures into practice. The approach pursued in this research is a combination of system dynamics and an agent-based simulation model of the city’s energy system, providing both a high spatial and temporal granularity. The model is developed with the multi-method modelling tool Anylogic and with Geographic Information System (GIS). The city itself is represented with its existing building and power infrastructure, which is then subject to the planned measures and developments. The core of the model implements on the one hand different energy generation technologies, both fossil fuels and renewables, reaching from big power plants to small local PV-installations on a private household’s roof. On the other hand, the heat and electricity consumers are represented through the buildings. The aim of the model is, at first, to provide a support system to analyze the short and long term effects of the Master Plan. Since its measures are usually not planned in detail concerning exact location or timing of the realization, the simulation results can provide references on these specific details. Secondly, the findings are used to identify the impact of single planned measures and their combinations which answers the questions of how, when and where local electricity and heat producers and the energy efficiency measures influence one another and if they have synergetic or competitive effects. Finally, a set of recommendations is derived from the analyses, which can help the city planners to transfer the strategic measures of the Master Plan into operative business.

In this paper, we extend the understanding of human interaction dynamics by examining three case studies of social-action-networks whose purpose was to achieve collective action on a complex social or environmental issue. Our research questions were “How do the organizing mechanisms of fine grained interactions construct emergent order?” and “Why do influencing strategies enable diffuse networks to emerge into discernible collective action?” The studies provided information about the fine-grained interactions as well as the coarse-grained properties that emerged. At the fine-grained level, there was a dynamic tension between structured and formalized organizing mechanisms aimed at organization and those that actively permitted (dis)organization. Network strategic intent was coherent at the coarse-grained level and varied between a clearly defined strategy and strategic ambiguity. We examine these empirical findings in relation to recent literature on constructing forces, strategic ambiguity and interpretive dominance.