Systemic transitions

This programme studies whether a transition holds once it meets shocks, scarcity and the interactions between sectors. It treats the economy as a system: production networks, money and finance, energy and material stocks, institutions and the rules of competition.

Its central concept is robustness: staying stable in the short term and viable in the long term, despite fluctuation and scarcity. It asks which margins, redundancies and rules make a system robust, what they cost, who bears that cost and how it could be financed. It combines theory, from complex systems and ecological economics, with models of real economies.

Efficiency treats reserve stocks, second suppliers, spare capacity and slowness as waste. They are also what lets a system absorb a shock. We use the definition of robustness proposed by the biologist Olivier Hamant: stable in the short term, viable in the long term, despite fluctuation and scarcity. The programme asks when such margins survive competition, what they cost in normal times, and who could pay for them.

Some questions here, such as financing margins through monetary routes other than public borrowing, are debated. We state them as hypotheses with the result that would refute them, not as positions.

1. 01Robustness roadmaps: which margins, where, against which shocks, at what cost, who carries them and how they are financed