Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) aims to analyze governance systems addressing sustainability at different scales and to generate cooperative solutions.
Societal transitions caused by unprecedented technological innovations and industrial transformations, such as energy transitions or digitalisation, as well as environmental or health related crises require new effective governance approaches to handle inherent social dilemmas and wicked problems.
Transformative governance includes formal and informal institutions which are involved - at multiple scales - in responding to, managing, and triggering positive shifts in coupled social-ecological systems towards sustainability. A growing complexity of decision-making processes in modern society requires improved synchronization and coordination of different branches and levels of governance. Transformative governance faces two major challenges. First, the underlying difficulty of any transformative governance process is a social dilemma, that is a collective action situation when interests of separate individuals contradict interests of a community or society. Second, transformative governance involves with wicked problems – problems that are difficult or impossible to solve as they are characterized by incomplete information and contradicting and constantly evolving views and objectives of involved stakeholders and social groups.
Th CAT group focus is on wicked problems and social dilemmas in decision-making advancing appropriate methodologies and conducting a series of case studies. Areas of application include:
- Public health including COVID-19;
- Climate change and natural hazards,
- Biodiversity and ecosystems, including oceans;
- Societal transitions caused by technological innovations, industrial transformations or environmental changes; and
- Digital world and misinformation spread in the Internet.
The CAT group is using the following methods:
- cooperation models, including game-theoretical models for public good and common pool management with real-world complexities as well as bounded rationality, social heterogeneity, cultural dispositions, and institutional incentives;
- decision support systems accounting for multiple conflicting objectives; and
- methods to facilitate stakeholder dialogue, including participatory modelling, systems mapping, gamification, scenario planning.
The overarching methodological ambition of CAT’s work is to advance the practice of using models to understand and support decision making processes that are characterized by uncertainty, volatility, ambiguity and complexity.
CAT has a unique composition of researchers from a wide area range of disciplines that are fundamental for addressing its goals. The Research Group includes researchers from political sciences, mathematics, game theorists, behavioural economists, among others. The unique combination of deep disciplinary knowledge, a broad understanding of the practical challenges of transformative governance, and rigorous mathematical and systems-analytical focus is a strong basis for innovative work of high societal relevance. Extended networks of several young and senior scientists enables delivering real-world impact by addressing contested governance problems.
Models, tools, datasets
Projects
Staff
News

12 July 2023
Unmasking Climate Conversations: Insights from Twitter Discourse. IIASA Researcher Presents Study at International Association for Media and Communication Research Pre-Conference

13 June 2023
Rise of malicious bots: how automatons shake up Twitter with earthquake conspiracies

04 May 2023
A Data Treasure Trove: How social media has become an unexpected source of natural experiments
Events
01 June 2022 Luxembourg, Luxembourg
IIASA at the “Well-Being 2022: Knowledge for informed decisions” conference
Focus

03 July 2023
The science activist: should science get political?
For science to become more value-neutral and less biased, it needs to question existing social norms and transcend the status quo, writes Pratik Patil, a researcher in the Advancing Systems Analysis Program and a member of the Transformations within Reach initiative coordination team.
28 June 2023
Applying a methodological framework for COVID-19 management in Botswana

11 July 2022
Strategic thinking for pandemics

Publications
Msangi, H.A., Waized, B., Lohr, K., Sieber, S., & Ndyetabula, D.W. (2023). Development outcomes of land tenure formalization under customary and statutory land tenure systems in Tanzania: a multinomial endogenous switching regression approach. Agriculture & Food Security 11 (1) 10.1186/s40066-022-00403-3. Deka, C., Dutta, M.K., Yazdanpanah, M., & Komendantova, N. (2023). Can Gain Motivation Induce Indians to Adopt Electric Vehicles? Application of an Extended Theory of Planned Behavior to Map EV Adoption Intention. Energy Policy 182 e113724. 10.1016/j.enpol.2023.113724. Krupenev, D., Komendantova, N. , Boyarkin, D., & Iakubovskii, D. (2023). Digital platform of reliability management systems for operation of microgrids. Energy Reports 10 2486-2495. 10.1016/j.egyr.2023.09.048. Xi, X., Sun, P., Sun, R., Tian, Y., & Heino, M. (2023). Size-selective harvesting alters biological traits of marine medaka (Oryzias melastigma). Fisheries Research 266 e106775. 10.1016/j.fishres.2023.106775. Lutz, W. & Pachauri, S. (2023). Systems Analysis for Sustainable Wellbeing. 50 years of IIASA research, 40 years after the Brundtland Commission, contributing to the post-2030 Global Agenda. IIASA Report. Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) 10.5281/zenodo.8214208.