Methodological and Ideological OptionsAdaptive Policy Framework through the Lens of the Viability Theory: A Theoretical Contribution to Sustainability in the Anthropocene Era

- The Anthropocena Era and globalization have transformed the Earth into a SESM.
- Five paradigms and scientific reflexes are disputed when considering global risks.
- “Viability Theory” & “Anticipatory” & “Adaptive Governance” solve the scientific turns.
- We set an integrative framework for conceiving adaptive policy against global risks.

The Earth is an evolutionary system that can be viewed as a Social-Ecological System built around Money (SESM) because of the coupling of the Anthropocene Era with globalization. Given the simultaneous (environmental-economic) risks of “total uncertainty” and “systemic aftermath”, several paradigmatic turns are required. Ecological economics is a cutting-edge field that tackles this issue. An integrative framework involving co-evolutionary modelling offers methods for addressing the regulation issue that arises from the significant uncertainty driven by global economic and ecological risks. We tackle the issue of adaptive policy for SESM regulation by answering the call for paradigmatic turns, which leads us to support tychastic vs. stochastic uncertainty, in time adaptation vs. optimal belated solutions, viability vs. stationary equilibrium, and interdisciplinarity and participatory processes in modelling and policy action. We describe step by step how to conceive SESM modelling through the lens of the mathematical viability theory (MVT), and we argue that this lens, when adjusted for anticipatory and adaptive governance (AAG), is relevant to examining sustainability for complex adaptive SESMs from a local or global perspective.