Takshashila Institution Organised a Workshop on Complexity, Society & Public Policy

The Takshashila Institution organised a workshop on Complexity, Society & Public Policy on October 28th & 29th at Vama Retreats, Nandi, Karnataka. The workshop was attended by experts from the fields of physics, biology, mathematics, economics, and public policy. 

The workshop sought to create a cross-disciplinary community consisting of scholars interested in social issues and public policy. It aimed to curate a set of public policy challenges in the Indian context and identify a set of complex systems concepts, tools, and approaches that might be used to address these challenges. It also aimed to develop a research programme that deploys complex systems approaches to solving public policy problems.

The participants in the workshop included Suri Venkatachalam, Arjun Jayadev, Gautam Menon, Shashi Thutupalli, Neelima Gupte, Sitabhra Sinha, Sarika Jalan, Chitra Pattabiraman, Anand Shrivastava, Sanjay Jain, Siddharth Gore, Nitin Pai, Sachin Kalbag, Shambhavi Naik, Pranay Kotasthane, Anupam Manur, Harshit Kukreja, Sarthak Pradhan, and Carl Jaison. 

The workshop opened with a session on why public policy and social sciences should be interested in complexity. It explored the extent to which a complex systems approach helps illuminate challenges arising from public policy problems that bear no easy resolution owing to intricate interdependencies, shifting conditions, and the like.

The second session was on the fundamental insights from complexity sciences and focused on an overview of the toolbox in complexity studies which includes game theory, evolutionary biology, information theory, scaling, econophysics, non-equilibrium dynamics, etc.

This was followed by a case study session on the application of the complexity toolkit to a specific public policy problem - public health. As a challenge, participants could think about the issue of public health and suggest how their preferred tools could illuminate something that may not be addressed through conventional approaches.

The second day of the workshop began with the second case study session on the application of the complexity toolkit to another public policy problem - urban traffic. This was followed by the concluding session on reflections from the workshop, where the participants looked at the limitations, opportunities, project ideas, and agenda for the future emerging from the workshop.