ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how diversity and interdependence affect the network's capacity to adapt in the period of major environmental change. Diversity is intended to refer to the number of distinguishable economic species in an economic system. Christen Rose-Andersen set out to explore the fundamentals of radical change and sustainability for communities of practice in their environment. In a presentation about organic agriculture, Richard Taylor discussed the relation between diversity and organic farming methods, pointing out that organic growing is associated with much higher levels of agricultural and ecological diversity than conventional farming. The presentations involved philosophy, discourse, biology and ecology, human systems, organic farming, economics, business systems and urban development. The chapter shows how the mathematics of multidimensional networks can give a coherent way of representing multilevel human systems and their multidimensional dynamics, including the dynamics of self-organisation, emergence, adaptation and co-evolution between subsystems.
