ABSTRACT
The main objective of this chapter is to present some conceptual and methodological considerations which might be useful in designing models of dependent development.
In Section 2, we will argue that, in order to operationalize a multi-level systems approach to dependent development, modelling techniques which focus on the notion of causal structure could be used. The central proposition for this paper is that several properties of the causal structure of complex models can provide an operational methodology appropriate to the theoretical approach of dependency in a multi-level systems framework.
