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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.