588.1
Socioenvironmental Development As a Guided Self-Organized PHASE Transition
Development is an evolutionary socioeconomic process characterized by the improvement in the sustainable satisfaction of the basic needs of the population related with a societal system.
A socioeconomic system has four types of interrelated economic processes:
a) Production of goods.
b) Exchanging part of the goods produced for other goods produced outside the system.
c) Investing part of the available goods to enlarge its productive infrastructure.
d) Consuming part of the available goods to satisfy the needs of its population.
It is the balanced development of these four types of economic processes what allows the development of the socioeconomic system.
The socioeconomic system may be modeled as a complex adaptive system in interaction with its environment. Its four economic processes have properties expressed as state variables associated with a value that is changing through the development process. The analysis of the development dynamics is based on the behavior of these state variables.
An underdeveloped society is not able to satisfy the basic physiological and safety needs of the majority of its people because its state is on the basin of a poverty attractor. Then it must implement a guided self-organizing phase transition to a sustainable development attractor as following:
1. Analyze its economic processes through participatory workshops.
2. Define short, medium and long-term development objectives.
3. Prioritize problems to be solved in the development process.
4. Identify and collect the appropriate resources to solve the detected problems.
5. Programming, implementing and monitoring the specific actions to address the problems identified.
In this paper a conceptual model of the development process is presented, based on the Complex Systems Approach and tested through a field research and a detailed case study in the State Chiapas.