Abstract
The role of individual and collective human action is increasingly
recognized as a prominent and arguably paramount determinant in shaping
the behavior, trajectory, and vulnerability of multisector systems. This
human influence operates at multiple scales: from short-term (hourly to
daily) to long-term (annually to centennial) timescales, and from the
local to the global, pushing systems towards either desirable or
undesirable outcomes. However, the effort to represent human systems in
multisector models has been fragmented across philosophical,
methodological, and disciplinary lines. To cohere insights across
diverse modeling approaches, we present a new typology for classifying
how human actors are represented in the broad suite of coupled
human-natural system models that are applied in MultiSector Dynamics
(MSD) research. The typology conceptualizes a “sector” as a
system-of-systems that includes a diverse group of human actors, defined
across individual to collective social levels, involved in governing,
provisioning, and utilizing products, goods, or services towards some
human end. We trace the salient features of modeled representations of
human systems by organizing the typology around three key questions: 1)
Who are the actors in MSD systems? 2) What are their actions? 3) How and
for what purpose are these actors and actions operationalized in a
computational model? We use this typology to critically examine existing
models and chart the frontier of human systems modeling for MSD
research.