Brazil has initiated two territorial public policies for a rural sustainable development, the National Program for Sustainable Development of the Rural Territories (PRONAT) and Citizenship Territory Program (PTC). These public policies aims, as a condition for its effectiveness, the equilibrium of the power relations between actors which participate in the Collegiate for Territorial Development (CODETER) of each Rural Territory. Our research studies the hypotheses that, in the Rural Territories submitted to the PRONAT and PTC public policies, the power and reciprocity relations between actors engaged in the CODETER effectively have evolved in favor of the civil society representatives to the detriment of the public powers, notably the mayors.

The SocLab approach has been applied in two case studies and four models representing the Southern Rural Territory of Sergipe (TRSS) and the São Francisco Rural Territory (TRBSF) were designed for two referential periods, 2008-2012 and 2013-2017. These models were developed to evaluate the empowerment of the civil society in these rural territories due to thes two public policies, PRONAT and PTC.

This is a multi-patch meta-population ecological model. It intended as a test-bed in which to test the impact of humans with different kinds of social structure.

This model is linked to the paper “The Epistemic Role of Diversity in Juries: An Agent-Based Model”. There are many version of this model, but the current version focuses on the role of diversity in whether juries reach correct verdicts. Using this agent-based model, we argue that diversity can play at least four importantly different roles in affecting jury verdicts. (1) Where different subgroups have access to different information, equal representation can strengthen epistemic jury success. (2) If one subgroup has access to particularly strong evidence, epistemic success may demand participation by that group. (3) Diversity can also reduce the redundancy of the information on which a jury focuses, which can have a positive impact. (4) Finally, and most surprisingly, we show that limiting communication between diverse groups in juries can favor epistemic success as well.

This is a computational model to articulate the theory and test some assumption and axioms for the trust model and its relationship to SBH.

We provide an agent-based model of collective action, informed by Granovetter (1978) and its replication model by Siegel (2009). We use the model to examine the role of ICTs in collective action under different cultural and political contexts.

The model explores how two types of information - social (in the form of pheromone trails) and private (in the form of route memories) affect ant colony level foraging in a variable enviroment.

RAGE models a stylized common property grazing system. Agents follow a certain behavioral type. The model allows analyzing how household behavior with respect to a social norm on pasture resting affects long-term social-ecological system dynamics.

A Repast Simphony model of interactions (conflict and cooperation) between states

We present the Integrated Urban Complexity model (IUCm 1.0) that computes “climate-smart urban forms”, which are able to cut emissions related to energy consumption from urban mobility in half. Furthermore, we show the complex features that go beyond the normal debates about urban sprawl vs. compactness. Our results show how to reinforce fractal hierarchies and population density clusters within climate risk constraints to significantly decrease the energy consumption of urban mobility. The new model that we present aims to produce new advice about how cities can combat climate change. From a technical angle, this model is a geographical automaton, conceptually interfacing between cellular automata and spatial explicit optimisation to achieve normative sustainability goals related to low energy. See a complete user guide at https://iucm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ .

The “Urban Drought Nexus Tool” is a system dynamics model, aiming to facilitate the co-development of climate services for cities under increasing droughts. The tool integrates multiple types of information and still can be applied to other case studies with minimal adjustments on the parameters of land use, water consumption and energy use in the water sector. The tool needs hydrological projections under climate scenarios to evaluate climatic futures, and requires the co-creation of socio-economic future scenarios with local stakeholders. Thus it is possible to provide specific information about droughts taking into account future water availability and future water consumption. Ultimately, such complex system as formed by the water-energy-land nexus can be reduced to single variables of interest, e.g. the number of events with no water available in the future and their length, so that the complexities are reduced and the results can be conveyed to society in an understandable way, including the communication of uncertainties. The tool and an explanatory guide in pdf format are included. Planned further developments include calibrating the system dynamics model with the social dynamics behind each flow with agent-based models.