Law, Public Policies and Complex Systems: Networks in Action

Complexity of law, although regularly denounced by both the authorities and the citizens, is a growing phenomenon. There are many reasons for this: the proliferation of norms, the multiplication of different normative sources of law or the regulations required by the evolution of our society. Under all regimes, governments have sought to reduce complexity by implementing simplification policies, one of the most effective of which has been codification, which decreases complexity by using simplifying modes of logical thinking. The dematerialisation of the law has transformed the process of its knowledge by the memorisation and the manipulation of the signs and the computer tool allowed a modelling of the law by passing from an inaccessible concrete to a handleable abstraction. New concepts such as interaction, regulation, feedback or evolution can now be grasped. The systemic approach and its methodological extension, agility, alternate theory and practice and look for relevance rather than exhaustiveness. The reticular law, another form of the modelling of law this time in the form of graphs, integrates “nodality”, or sporadic aggregations of legal relations, and offers itself as a new dimension of legal science. While it does not reduce the complexity of law, the pooling of legal and informatics knowledge opens perspectives that are only starting to be explored by proposing new configurations of the legal fields.

What is the capacity of an informal network of organizations to produce answers in response to complex tasks requiring the integration of masses of information designed as a high-level cognitive and collective activity? Are some network configurations more favourable than others to accomplish these tasks? We present a method to make these assessments, inspired by the Information Integration Theory issued from the modelling of consciousness. First we evaluate the informational network created by the sharing of information between organizations for the realization of a given task. Then we assess the natural network ability to integrate information, a capacity determined by the partition of its members whose information links are less efficient. We illustrate the method by the analysis of various functional integrations of Southeast Asian organizations, creating a spontaneous network participating in the study and management of interactions between health and environment. Several guidelines are then proposed to continue the development of this fruitful analogy between artificial and organizational consciousness (refraining ourselves from assuming that one or the other exists).

In April–May of 2013, Sampang Regency (Madura Island), experienced extreme seasonal rains, and subsequent flooding, followed by dramatic peaks in reported leptospirosis. Local public health surveillance efforts responded to these events and an investigative regional report was launched by the Centre for Environmental Health Engineering and Disease Control, Sampang Regional Health Office. In light of this outbreak and targeted investigation, this study sought to combine existing surveillance data with descriptive household data to investigate leptospirosis incidence and its associated socio-environmental exposures in Sampang and two neighbouring regencies of Gresik and Surabaya in East Java, Indonesia. Leptospirosis has a complex and variable disease epidemiology. In order to identify environmental and social risk determinants of cases of leptospirosis, a total of 275 household questionnaires were administered across nine targeted sample sites in the regencies of Gresik, Sampang, and Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. Univariate analysis and binomial logistic regression were used to analyze associations of independent predictor variables with suspected and probable case reporting.

Results revealed a history of leptospirosis in 30 respondents. Independent predictors that demonstrated significant association with reported leptospirosis were: living in flood prone areas, recent history of in-house flooding, living in close proximity to refuse deposits, occupational farming, and using alternative sources of water for domestic use (artesian wells, rivers and collected rain water). Household access to piped or canalized running water had a negative association with reported leptospirosis outcomes. The results of the binary logistic regression analysis produced a model with overall fit. Across the nine targeted sample sites, significant discrepancies in surveillance reporting were found between each of the five corresponding health clinics, as well as the three regencies of Gresik, Sampang, and Surabaya, indicating distinct surveillance systems and health responses. While increases in rainfall and flooding events have been well established as determinants, this study highlights two additional key factors attributable to changes in the distribution of leptospirosis: socio-sanitary deprivation, as well as a lack of integrated public health surveillance systems. This research reinforces the success of certain local and adaptive surveillance initiatives, and recommends the wider integration of disciplinary efforts and resources across communities, institutions and sectors for effective public health action.

In Southeast Asia, regional institutions insist on the crucial role of innovative research to address sustainable development challenges. Among those challenges, the increasing human dominance of the global landscape, particularly in regard to forest cover loss is of major concern. Such dramatic habitat changes are accelerating the biodiversity loss. This reduction in biodiversity through altered landscapes due to urbanization and agricultural intensification appears linked to major epidemiological changes in human diseases with higher disease risks and the emergence of novel pathogens resulting from increased contacts between wildlife, domesticated animals and humans.

It appears necessary to investigate the multiple impacts of the intensification of the circulation along the economic corridor Thailand-Laos (linking Myanmar to Vietnam) on the evolution of infectious diseases of public health interests. Integrating the various dimensions of complexity thanks to disciplines such as ecology and environmental sciences, health sciences, policies and law, we analyse retrospectively, and comparatively infectious diseases’ dynamics associated to policies, land use and biodiversity changes. The need of prospective scenarios of health that are embedded in the socio-ecosystems is crucial: we will thus produce scenarios of future health embodied in the One Health approach at the human-animal-environment interface and directed towards decisions-makers or communities concerned at the national or local scale.

The French Institute for Public Health Surveillance (InVS, French Public Health Agency) described its complex activities of monitoring, surveillance and warning into official reports published in 2005, 2006 and 2011. Taking these documents as a starting point, we employed Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA) and Universal Modeling Language (UML) to design the architecture of a system able to suitably perform these activities. The conceptual framework of our modeling work implies studying (1) “risk exposure situation” to environmental health threats of human, animal or vegetal populations and (2) responsibilities of the system in charge of monitoring, reporting and warning in case of unacceptable risks. Three examples of environmental health threats illustrate the model: bluetongue (an insect-borne disease of animal populations presenting serious economic impact), human intoxication by chlordecone (a persistent organochlorine pesticide used until early 1990s in French West Indies for banana weevil borer control) and human intoxication by phycotoxins (natural metabolites produced by marine microalgae), due to ingestion of contaminated seafood.

French people were astonished to learn of the death of an opponent to the construction of a dam in the Sivens forest, in the Tarn department (France), during clashes with the police on the night of 25 to 26 October 2014. However, the violence of the means deployed to realize this work and the determination of opponents, together woven in the play of all the actors of this project, foreshadowed the possibility of such a drama. Using a formal analysis framework based on the sociology of organized action, we present a model of this interaction system whose simulation results highlight the overdetermined nature of the emergence of a conflict of extreme intensity. Variations in this model allow the identification of the main determinants of this conflict and to consider other possible futures.

Within the OpenLaws.eu project, we attempt to suggest relevant new sources of law to users of legal portals based on the documents they are focusing on at a certain moment in time, or those they have selected. In the future we attempt to do this both based on ‘objective’ features of the documents themselves and on ‘subjective’ information gathered from other users (‘crowdsourcing’). At this moment we concentrate on the first method. In Sect. 10.2 I describe how we create the web of law if it is not available in machine readable form, or extend it when that is necessary. Next, I present results of experiments using analysis of the network of references or citations to suggest these new documents. In Sect. 10.3 I describe two experiments where we mix the use of network analysis with similarity based on the comparison of the actual text of documents. One experiment is based on simple bag-of-words and normalisation, the other uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with added n-grams. A small formative evaluation in both experiments suggests that text similarity alone works better than network analysis alone or a combination, at least for Dutch court decisions.

In analyzing the ratifications of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and United Nations-based trade agreements, this study pursues two goals: first, to provide evidence of the limitations of the role played by the United Nations in promoting sustainable development as a bridge between both regimes, although member states are roughly the same; second, on a methodological side, to contribute to the exploration of the use of hypergraphs to model a dynamic in International Relations, as illustrated by analyzing empirical data easily accessible and available on the web. We use 3550 ratification dates of MEAs (1979–2015) and 834 ratifications of trade agreements (1963–2014) available on the website of the United Nations Treaty Collection. The hypergraph-based analysis of the temporal successions of ratifications highlights informal communities of countries whose contours emerge through this uncoordinated process of ratification. The European countries and more specifically members of the European Union, and their Atlantic allies stand out as having the leadership of the construction of a global environmental order. However, no formally established community of countries emerges from the chronology of ratification of the United Nations trade agreements. In this particular UN context, none of the contemporary trade powers is even central to this dynamic. Indeed, most trade negotiations take place outside the United Nations arena, particularly in the framework of the World Trade Organization, or in regional, bilateral, or even minilateral partnerships.

This study intends to demonstrate the value of using the partial order set theory comparing different but intertwined sets of indicators or indexes. We illustrate this approach by analysing the relative positions (partial order) of a set of countries with consideration for environmental and development indicators. Using data from 2013, the analysis mainly covers the countries with economies having a strong impact on climate change—China, the USA, the European Union (member States), India, Russian Federation, Japan, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. The concepts of total and partial orders, linear extension or comparability are introduced and used in the analysis. The inclusion of three integrative environmental indicators and two development indicators (human development index and GDP per capita) shows that in 2013 the BRICS were the worst positioned countries. In contrast, several countries in Northern Europe (Denmark, followed by Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) were associated with the best overall indicators. Canada is not comparable to any other country, the values of its indicators being sometimes higher and sometimes lower than those associated to any other country considered in this study. The USA, comparable to a single country, shows a similar behaviour for the same reasons.

Work on network theory and the law has become increasingly popular over the past decade. A common feature of this work is how scholars approach the law as a matter of information. By distinguishing three different levels of analysis on legal information “as” reality, “about” reality, and “for” reality, this paper restricts the focus of the analysis to the law conceived as a set of rules or instructions for the determination of other informational objects, i.e. legal information for reality. The aim is to stress that network theory can be fruitful either as a support for the deliberation and decisions made by legislators and policy makers, or as a support for scholars and experts about what should be deemed as legally relevant. Any approach that scarcely debates, or simply ignores this facet of legal information, would simply persist in doing so at its own risk.