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Abstract

Social norms are a key socio-cultural driver of human behaviour and have been identified as a central process in potential social tipping dynamics. They play a central role in governance and thus represent a possible intervention point for collective action problems in the Anthropocene, such as natural resource management. A detailed modelling framework for social norm change is needed to capture the dynamics of human societies and their feedback interactions with the natural environment. To date, resource use models often incorporate social norms in an oversimplified manner, as a robust and detailed coupled social-ecological model, scaling from the local to the global World-Earth scale, is lacking. Here we present a multi-level network framework with a complex contagion process for modelling the dynamics of descriptive and injunctive social norms. The framework is complemented by social groups and their attitudes, which can significantly influence the adoption of social norms. We integrate the modelling concept of norms together with an additional individual social learning component into a model of coupled social-ecological dynamics with a closed feedback loop, implemented in the copan:CORE framework for World–Earth modelling. We find that norms generally bifurcate the behaviour space into two extreme states: one sustainable and one unsustainable. Reaching a sustainable (i.e. safe) state becomes more likely with low thresholds of conforming to sustainable norms, as well as lower consideration rates of own resource harvesting success. Modelling both descriptive and injunctive norms independently and dynamically introduces additional intermediate states, e.g. when there are countervailing norms. The shape of the bifurcation depends on the number of groups and members and thus on the social network topology. Where groups are very inert in changing their attitudes and thus consistently convey the same norm, multiple stable basins for sustainability levels are found. Groups influence the dynamics by facilitating or inhibiting the contagion of sustainable behaviour by communicating their norms. The success of a generic social norm intervention is also found to be highly dependent on the group topology. Our findings suggest that explicitly modelling social norm processes together with social groups enriches the dynamics of social-ecological models and determines safe operating spaces. Consequently, both should be taken into account when representing human behaviour in coupled World–Earth models.