ABSTRACT
This chapter forms the core of the book and presents a conceptual model of social complexity formation. Following the tenets of complex systems thinking, it starts from the fundamental building blocks giving rise to social complexity: social interaction and information transmission, practices, and social structuration. It is then discussed how these building blocks result in the emergence of social complexity by outlining a model of complexity formation. This model starts from selection pressures acting as input information for decision-making strategies, using mechanisms of problem-solving to generate strategies that act as pushing or pulling forces for societal development. This iterative loop of information transmission, information processing, and decision-making produces a series of outcomes that affect the flows of energy, resources and information, and shape social complexity trajectories. This model is then contextualised in two outcomes of complexity formation: community formation and polity formation. Next, the focus shifts to the energetic costs of complexity and its effects in social transformation and collapse. The chapter concludes with the integration of the model as part of the adaptive cycles framework to produce coherent epistemic scaffolding for the study of multi-scalar dynamics of stability and change in social-ecological systems driven by social complexity trajectories.
