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Gardner’s (1988) criteria for sustainability assessment combine
aspects consistent with the learning perspective. A subset of criteria is dedicated to adaptivity. Strategies are expected to be experimental, responsive, anticipatory,
dealing with uncertainty and maintaining diversity and options for resilience.
Complex systems are systems consisting of a large number of interconnected elements. The interconnections
are nonlinear and dynamic (Lissack and Letiche, 2002). The complex structure of such systems display behavioral
complexity, which makes prediction of future behavior extremely difficult, if possible at all.
The most important of these behavioral characteristics are the sensitivity to initial conditions, the diversity of qualitatively
different behaviors, self-organization, and emergence (Richardson, 2005)
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