A ForestPaths study, conducted by the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMKIFU) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), a project partner, addresses the challenges of policy-making in complex land systems, where goals such as climate mitigation, food security and biodiversity recovery often conflict and where conventional policies have proven inconsistent or counterproductive. Recognising the limitations of traditional models, which typically treat interventions in isolation and fail to capture feedbacks between policies, land users and institutions, the research develops a heuristic- and incrementalism-based framework of endogenous institutions. Integrated with the CRAFTY agent-based land use model, this framework allows the study to explore how adaptive institutions interact with diverse land users, revealing emergent patterns and offering new insights into the socio-ecological dynamics of policy and land use. 

As previously mentioned, the paper integrates an endogenous institutional model with the CRAFTY agent-based land use framework, treating institutions as adaptive agents within a closed-loop system that observes land use outcomes and adjusts policies to achieve objectives. Institutions evaluate discrepancies between policy goals and actual outcomes using PID and fuzzy logic controllers, translating these gaps into incremental policy adjustments while considering constraints such as budgets, stakeholder pressures and policy inertia.  

The model is organised into four interlinked sub-models: initialisation, information-evaluation-adaptation, budget allocation and policy implementation, that operate iteratively, allowing institutions to collect data, assess policy performance, allocate resources and implement interventions such as taxes and subsidies. A proof-of-concept simulation with one institution managing two policies influencing crop and meat production demonstrates how these adaptive mechanisms interact with land users to generate emergent, system-level patterns in socio-ecological dynamics. 

The study demonstrates that endogenising institutional policy-making within a land system model generates meaningful emergent dynamics, including diminishing marginal effects, asymmetric spill-over between ecosystem services and sensitivity to policy adaptation frequency. These patterns arise from the interplay of adaptive institutions and heterogeneous land users, reflecting system self-consistency and real-world constraints such as budgets, capacity limits and trade-offs across services. The model’s design emphasises parsimony, transparency and extensibility, using PID-fuzzy logic controllers to simulate heuristic, incremental policy adjustments while preserving interpretability.  

Read the full study here.