Complex Systems of Property: Change and Resilience After a Catastrophic Disaster

Abstract

Abstract This Article applies emerging literature on resilience in complex systems to institutional change in property rights systems. Complex systems theory provides an alternative to economic models that adopt assumptions of linearity in property rights transitions—where inputs such as rising resource values induce proportionate outputs in the formation of private property rights. Based on a case study of catastrophic disaster, the Article concludes that institutional change in a complex property system does not involve proportionate or predictable responses to sudden shocks in the external environment. The stochasticity of institutional change arises from acts of adaptive self-organization across multiple scales of proprietary governance. The “added value” of systems theory is a set of conceptual tools—such as scale, stochasticity, and self-organization—which help to explain resilience and change in property systems affected by sudden environmental shocks.