Adaptive Cycle
Description
Daniel Christian Wahl:
"The adaptive cycle is a model of natural patterns of change in ecosystems and eco-social systems. It consists of four distinct phases: ‘growth or exploitation’ (r); ‘conservation’ (K) of established patterns and resource distribution; ‘collapse or release’ (Ω); and reorganization (α). The adaptive cycle is often drawn like an infinity symbol or Möbius loop that joins these four phases.
The journey from exploitation (growth in the diagram above) to conservation is referred to as the ‘fore-loop’ (blue and green part of the loop). It describes the slow and often longer phase of growth and accumulation of resources in the system. Eventually, too much rigid structure, fixed connections and accumulation of resources in the system make it brittle and poised for release or collapse.
The transition from release to reorganization is referred to as the ‘back-loop’ of the adaptive cycle (red and orange part of the loop). This phase is often fast moving and relatively short. In this phase the opportunity for redesign, reorganization and renewal is high, due to the release of rigid structures, established patterns and the redistribution of resources throughout the system. In the adaptive cycle, the creative ‘edge of chaos’ is reached during the beginning of the ‘release’ phase and left at the end of the ‘reorganization’ phase.
During the α-phase the opportunities for and likelihood of creative change is highest. In the r-phase these opportunities for change are tested against each other and one or a few innovations begin to define the characteristics of the transformed system. This structure is conserved and then begins itself to rigidify during the K-phase, until the often rapid and sometimes catastrophic release (collapse) in the Ω-phase takes us back to the creative ‘edge of chaos’ conditions. This offers renewed opportunities for reorganization in a new α-phase and a new adaptive cycle."
Example
Nafeez Ahmed:
“The “adaptive cycle” framework is one such way. Developed by the late ecologist C.S. Holling, it provides powerful insights when applied to the rise and fall of human social systems. Systems tend to grow, decline, and renew themselves over four phases: growth—defining the 200 or so years of rapid industrial growth since the 19th century; conservation—encompassing a period of consolidation in which the system stabilizes; release—a period of uncertainty and chaos as the system begins to weaken and decline; and finally reorganization, when the system undergoes a fundamental re-ordering which can pave the way for a new systemic life cycle.
Industrial civilization appears to have entered the last stages of its systemic life cycle long before the pandemic. While this “release” stage reveals the alarming results of previously entrenched social, political, economic, and cultural structures collapsing under the weight of their own incoherence, it also opens up unprecedented opportunities for radical change. At this point in a system’s life cycle, the weakening of top-down structures allows small perturbations to have wider re-ordering impacts across structures within the system.”
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"While ubiquitous in complex systems, most research on phase transitions is concentrated in the natural and physical sciences. A phase transition occurs when a system undergoes a fundamental change of state due to a “sharp transition” in the degree of organisation within the system due to changing external pressures. At the small scale of physical and biological systems, the “phase” of a system – its level of organisation – involves physical forces like temperature or magnetism. Yet phase transitions are also visible in large-scale complex ecological systems, including population dynamics (Heffern et al., 2021), where change is driven by multiple, simultaneous phase transitions within its constitutive sub systems.
Despite extensive theoretical modelling of phase transitions in traffic flow, crowd behaviour, financial markets, cultural dynamics and social collapse, empirical research validating these models is limited (Braha, 2024).
One of the most empirically robust approaches to understanding how phase transitions work in biological and ecological systems is the adaptive cycle framework developed by Crawford Holling and Lance Gunderson, derived from the study of a wide range of ecosystems including forests, predator-prey relations and population dynamics.
An adaptive cycle is an evolutionary process encompassing the whole life-cycle of a particular system, whose behaviour is defined by an evolving set of rules and properties equivalent to its organisational “phase”. It moves through four stages which characterise the behavioural features of how the system grows, adopts a defined complex structure and then declines before reorganising (Allen and Holling, 2010).
Figure 1 provides a visualisation of the four interlinked stages of the adaptive cycle moving through exploitation, conservation, release and reorganisation. The adaptive cycle begins with the rapid growth (r) of a living system as it exploits available resources based on available information about its environmental conditions. This phase transition involves new points of connection, interconnection and relationship, which form the overarching structure or phase of the entire system. As linkages within the system proliferate, it moves into a slower-growing state of conservation (K) where the form of the system becomes increasingly stable within and highly adapted to a limited number of immediate environmental conditions. Trading resilience for efficiency, the system tends to reuse existing structures to increase connectivity making it vulnerable to environmental disruptions that alter the landscape to which the system is adapted. The system collapses to a simpler state as previously accumulated materials and energy are released (X). This release creates an opening for renewal and uncertainty that did not previously exist, allowing a fourth and final phase of eorganisation (a) to emerge. The system can mobilise new information about environmental conditions to pursue new material adaptions. If successful, this provides the groundwork for a whole new life cycle.
These stages can be seen as two interconnected “loops” of movement, a “front loop” from growth to stabilisation and a “back loop” involving release and reorganisation. The “back loop” heralds the potential for a new life-cycle as the old structure enters a state of decline and indeterminacy, creating space for the emergence of a new system defined by a new organisational phase. The adaptive cycle occurs at all scales, with larger-scale “loops” consisting of phase transitions across constitutive systems. Holling described this nested Web of adaptive cycles as a “panarchy”.
The adaptive cycle explains a wide range of phenomena across complex systems in human societies, including technology, organisations, the global economy and human civilisation, (Fath et al., 2015) and is quantifiable according to thermodynamic indicators (Sundstrom and Allen, 2019; Rogers, 2017). Figure 2 represents this movement of the adaptive cycle chronologically as a socio-metabolic process with applicability to a wide range of societal and civilisational systems.
It has been used to explain the behaviours of hunter-gatherer communities (Thompson and Turck, 2009); pre-Neolithic societies in Western central Europe (Gronenborn et al., 2014); Maya civilisation (Dunning et al., 2012); tropical civilisations in Southeast Asia (Faulseit, 2016); polities in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee in the USA (Hally and Chamblee, 2019); and the evolution of human civilisation as a whole. (Rosen and Rivera- Collazo, 2012).
Despite this, there is relatively little exploration of how applying the adaptive cycle for foresight methodologies can support planetary scale decision-making."