Policymakers routinely make things worse when they try to fix global problems like trade, migration, and security. The core issue, according to this research programme, is that these systems are treated in isolation when they are in fact tightly coupled—and that coupling generates unpredictable, often destructive behaviour. Current scientific models, built for local and tractable systems, fail to capture this. The team at UCL will build integrated models—spatial interaction, reaction-diffusion, and network models—that treat trade, migration, security, and development aid as a single, interacting global system. They will calibrate these models to real data and create a "global intelligence system" that lets policymakers explore "what if" scenarios without the real-world cost of getting it wrong. If successful, this could fundamentally change how governments and international organisations anticipate crises, allocate aid, or respond to cascading events like a financial crash triggering a migration wave or a conflict disrupting trade routes. This is applied fundamental science: it takes complexity theory—chaos, bifurcations, phase transitions—and turns it into a practical forecasting tool for the most intractable human problems.
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Most of our science which is used to inform policy makers about future social and economic events has been built for systems that are local rather than global and are assumed to behave in ways that are relatively tractable and thus responsive to policy initiatives. Any examination of the degree to which such policy-making has been successful or even informative yields a very mixed picture with such interventions being only partly effective at best, and positively disruptive at worst. Human policy-making shows all the characteristics of a complex system. Many of our interventions make problems worse rather than better leading to the oft-quoted accusation that the solution is part of the problem .Complexity theory recognizes this dilemma. In this research programme, we will develop new forms of science which address the most difficult of human problems: those that involve global change where there is no organised constituency and whose agencies are largely regarded as being ineffective. We will argue that global systems tend to be treated in isolation from one another and that the unexpected dynamics that characterises their behaviour is due to their coupling and integration that is all to often ignored. To demonstrate this dynamics and to develop appropriate policy responses, we will study four related global systems: trade, migration, security (which includes crime, terrorism and military disputes) and development aid, which tends to be determined as a consequence of these three individual systems. The idea that this dynamics results from coupling suggests that to get a clear view of their dynamics and a better understanding of global change, we need to develop integrated and coupled models whose dynamics can be described in the conventional and perhaps not so conventional language of complexity theory: chaos, turbulence, bifurcations, catastrophes, and phase transitionsWe will develop three related styles of model: spatial interaction models embedded in predator-prey like frameworks which generate bifurcations in system behaviour, reaction diffusion models that link location to flow, and network models in which epidemic-like diffusion processes can be used to explain how events cascade into one another. We will apply spatial interaction models to trade and migration, reaction diffusion to military disputes and terrorism, and network models to international crime. We will extend these models to incorporate the generation of qualitative new events such as the emergence of new entities e.g. countries, coupling them together in diverse ways. We will ultimately develop a generic framework for a coupled global dynamics that spans many spatial and temporal scales and pertains to different systems whose behaviours can be simulated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our models will be calibrated to data which we will assemble during the project and which we already know exists in usable form.We will develop various models which incorporate all these ideas into a global intelligence system to inform global policy makers about future events. This system (and we intend there to be many versions of it) will allow policy makers to think the unthinkable and to explore all kinds of what if questions with respect to our four key global systems: trade, migration, security and development, while at the same time, enabling global dynamics to be considered as a coupling of these systems. We will begin developing these models for the UK in terms of the rest of the world but then extend this to embrace all the key countries and events relevant to this global dynamics. Our partners who in the first instance are UK government departments and multinational companies with a global reach will champion this extension to the global arena. The programme will be based on ten academic faculty at UCL spanning a wide range of centres and departments.
Alan Wilson (Principal Investigator)Alasdair Turner (Co-Investigator)Alex Braithwaite (Co-Investigator)Francesca Medda (Co-Investigator)Frank Thomas Smith (Co-Investigator)Hannah Fry (Co-Investigator)Michael Batty (Co-Investigator)Pablo Mateos (Co-Investigator)Sean Hanna (Co-Investigator)Shane Johnson (Co-Investigator)Steven Bishop (Co-Investigator)
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