Cooperation-Based Modeling of Sustainable Development: An Approach from Filippov’s Systems

The concept of Sustainable Development has given rise to multiple interpretations. In this article, it is proposed that Sustainable Development should be interpreted as the capacity of territory, community, or landscape to conserve the notion of well-being that its population has agreed upon. To see the implications of this interpretation, a Brander and Taylor model, to evaluate the implications that extractivist policies have over an isolated community and cooperating communities, is proposed. For an isolated community and through a bifurcation analysis in which the Hopf bifurcation and the heteroclinic cycle bifurcation are detected, 4 prospective scenarios are found, but only one is sustainable under different extraction policies. In the case of cooperation, the exchange between communities is considered by coupling two models such as the one defined for the isolated community, with the condition that their transfers of renewable resources involve conservation policies. Since human decisions do not occur in a continuum, but rather through jumps, the mathematical model of cooperation used is a Filippov System, in which the dynamics could involve two switching manifolds of codimension one and one switching manifold of codimension two. The exchange in the cooperation model, for specific parameter arrangements, exhibits n-periodic orbits and chaos. It is notable that, in the cases in which the system shows sliding, it could be interpreted as a recovery delay related to the time needed by the deficit community to recover, until its dependence on the other community stops. It is concluded (1) that a sustainability analysis depends on the way well-being is defined because every definition of well-being is not necessarily sustainable, (2) that sustainability can be visualized as invariant sets in the nonzero region of the space of states (equilibrium points, n-periodic orbits, and strange attractors), and (3) that exchange is key to the prevalence of the human being in time. The results question us on whether Sustainable Development is only to keep us alive or if it also implies doing it with dignity.