About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

71 Am. J. Comp. L. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/amcomp71 and id is 1 raw text is: 











DANIEL FITZPATRICK*


   Complex Systems of Property: Change and Resilience
                 After   a Catastrophic Disastert


    This Article applies emerging   literature on resilience in complex
systems  to institutional change  in property  rights systems. Complex
systems  theory provides an  alternative to economic models  that adopt
assumptions   of linearity in property rights transitions-where  inputs
such  as rising resource values induce proportionate  outputs in the for-
mation  of private property rights. Based on a case study of catastrophic
disaster, the Article concludes that institutional change  in a complex
property system  does not involve proportionate or predictable responses
to sudden  shocks  in the external environment.  The stochasticity of in-
stitutional change arises from acts of adaptive self-organization across
multiple scales of proprietary governance. The added  value of systems
theory is a set of conceptual tools-such as scale, stochasticity, and self-
organization-which help to explain resilience   and  change  in property
systems  affected by sudden environmental   shocks.


                              INTRODUCTION

     The  burgeoning   literature  on  systems   theory  includes  rela-
tively  little  on  change    and   resilience  in  complex    property

      * B.A., LL.B., LL.M., Ph.D., Professor, Monash University School of Law,
Clayton, Vict., Australia. Fieldwork for the Article was funded by the Australian
Research Council (FT110101065), and a debt of gratitude is owed to a number of field-
work assistants, including Nurdin Hussein, Ilyas Ismail, Muzajkir, Azhari Yahya,
Mohammed   Putra Iqbal, Ernita Dewi, Siti Rahmah, Laura Meitzner Yoder, Myrna
Safitri, Fakri Karim, Fithri Saifa, Fajri, Nurmalati, Luke Swainson, and Jane Dunlop.
Further assistance was provided by the dedicated staff of Oxfam International in
Banda Aceh, most notably Lilianne Fan. Comments on earlier drafts were kindly pro-
vided by participants at the U.S. Society for Environmental Law and Economics con-
ference 2019, and participants at the Complexity, Legal and Institutional Change, and
Rule of Law Conference at John Felice Rome Center, Loyola University, Chicago, IL,
in 2018. Earlier versions of empirical material in this work were presented in DANIEL
FITZPATRICK & CAROLINE COMPTON, LAW, PROPERTY AND DISASTERS: ADAPTERS PERSPECTIVES
FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH (2021).
      t https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avad007

© American Journal of Comparative Law 2023. All rights reserved. For permissions, please
email: journals.permissions@oup.com.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unre-
stricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

profiles profiles most