Equity, Urgency, Affordability: An ABM Exploration of Design Principles for Collective Action Institutions in Times of Crisis

Societal inequities and barriers to participation in societal decisions mean that some people and groups have difficulty in accessing sufficient resources to meet their essential needs. This increases the vulnerability of those who lack social and political capital intimes of crises, such as climate change impact events. Collective action institutions can redress this inequity by facilitating the redistribution of essential resources from the wealthy to the vulnerable. In this article, we use a stylised agent-based model of a community subject to a climate change impact that affects the availability of an essential resource. We use it to explore the types of societal conditions and policies that contribute to the emergence of a collective action institution that effectively redistributes resources to ensure that people are able to maintain a sufficient level of welfare. We find that removing barriers to participation in societal decisions for vulnerable people, and increasing sensitivity and urgency in the decision-making process to impacts in the community, help to realise effective collective action institutions. The key insight that our model helps to uncover is that participatory justice promotes timely distributive justice.