Sept., 2013
Journal of Resources and Ecology
J. Resour. Ecol. 2013 4 (3) 195-201
DOI:10.5814/j.issn.1674-764x.2013.03.002
www.jorae.cn
Vol.4 No.3
GIAHS
Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive
Systems: The Challenge of Complexity
Tony FULLER1* and MIN Qingwen2
1 College of Humanities and Development, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100094, China;
2 Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
Abstract: In rural life, everything is connected to everything else. Seen as a complex adaptive system, the
“rural” in most regions of the world has evolved over many centuries and is well known to have endured
invasive predations and conflicts and to have adapted to changing conditions, both physical and human,
many times. Such changes are recorded in the culture and in the landscapes which have continuously
evolved and which characterize rural places today. These features of contemporary rural life—economy,
culture and landscape—are the key elements of rural systems. Interestingly, they have also become the
elements that attract tourists to rural areas. This theoretical paper, starts from the position that the rural
world as a whole is complex and that systems adjust in the face of uncertainty, and a type of dynamism
that is generated externally in the form of shocks and stresses. Complex Adaptive Systems theory
provides an excellent opportunity to examine living systems such as Globally Important Agricultural
Heritage Systems (GIAHS) in China that can provide new perspectives on resilience and self-organizing
capabilities of the system. The paper suggests that adopting such approaches in contemporary research
will produce new insights of whole systems and stem the tide of mainstream scientific research that
reduces systems to their component parts and studies them with micro-techniques, while mostly failing to
reintegrate the component parts back into the system as a whole. By reviewing this approach in relation
to GIAHS and by introducing tourism into the rural village system, as a perturbation, we can create new
ways to understand the effects of rural development interventions in ancient landscapes such as those
which cover many parts of rural China today.
Key words: complex adaptive systems; tourism; villages; holons; theory; perturbations
1 Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)
In this paper, we propose to explore the theoretical
application of complex adaptive systems to the sites of
Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS)
in China (Min 2009; Koohafkan and Cruz 2011). We will
do this by posing the question of how tourism can affect
what, in many ways, is a closed village system. Systems
theory and research is that in which both human and
physical components of the system are examined together
to gain a better understanding of the system as a whole
(Smit et al. 1998; Waltner-Toews 2004; Robinson and
Fuller 2010; Connell 2010). There are two key subsystems
in all agricultural heritage sites; the human system and
the ecological system. Both subsystems have their own
subsystems which we will call holons to distinguish them
and avoid semantic muddle. For example, there are water
and land holons within the ecological subsystem (Luo
2011) and there are village and household holons within the
human subsystem (Sun 2010). In effect, these form a nested
hierarchy of holons (Allen and Hoekstra 1992). Most insight
into agricultural systems comes from analyzing the relations
between the subsystems and among the holons at different
scales and levels. For example, the land-use holon is of great
interest as it depicts the outcome of relations between people
and the land. It reflects the outcome of cultural traditions,
technological levels and soil conditions as well as market
prices and policy measures as interpreted by farmers and by
science. A farming system is the sum, at any one time, of
many subsystem and holon interactions.
When systems are faced with changing conditions or
interruptions (referred to as “perturbations” or disturbances
Received: 2013-06-20 Accepted: 2013-08-21
Foundation: Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists (Grant No.Y0S00100KD).
* Corresponding author: Tony FULLER. Email: [email protected].
196
Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3, 2013
in the Complex Adaptive Systems discourse) in the
internal system (e.g., rapid population growth) or external
environment (e.g., market or policy shifts), the whole
system may be adjusted according to a mediated process
between man and his understanding of the environment,
as well as his interpretation of the changing subsystem
or holon itself. This produces an adaptation of the whole
system to suit the new conditions introduced through one
subsystem. As all holons are linked together in various
ways, a change in one will affect changes in many of the
others. This is called adaptive capacity, the ability of the
system to adjust to new circumstances emanating at first
from one subsystem or holon and spreading to many others.
Another related measure of this attribute is “resilience”, that
capacity to return to normal after a serious change has taken
place affecting many holons and the two subsystems (Birkes
and Folke 1998).
Changes themselves can be seen as either catastrophic
or severe. In the first case they are called “shocks” and
usually require drastic adjustment beginning somewhere
in the whole system. A severe pressure on the system may
be referred to as a “stress”. A shock is unexpected, while
a stress is more long-term and knowable. An example of a
shock would be an earthquake or forest fire, while a stress
would be a drought which, over time, builds pressure on the
whole system. The former requires an emergency response
and subsequent adjustments, the latter is slower and can
have predictable impacts such that plans to adjust over
time can be strategic and are often more effective. Physical
systems tend to adjust themselves to both shocks and
stresses and are considered to be self-organizing. Physical
systems, if left to themselves rarely return to “normal”
and reach a new state which can be referred to as a “new
normal”. Human systems are also resilient and can adjust to
new circumstances, but in general demonstrate a stronger
tendency to return to the old normal. This may be a key
differentiating feature of the two sub-systems.
With this brief description of the postmodern view
of systems, it is evident that we are dealing with a high
degree of complexity. However, complexity in this context
Education
and
research
Transport
Soil
Culture
Land
holding
The farming
system
means more than life being complicated. It means looking
at problems in a different way and accepting that there
are many things, connections and relationships, that we
know little about. Research in this mode is about surprise
and discovery, rather than prediction via reductionism
(Robinson and Fuller 2010). As Connell (2010) points out:
“complexity means to look differently at the world; it is to
no longer believe that we can understand the world better
by collecting more information and doing better science.”
Each holon can be considered a system in its own
right, and each holon is connected to all the other holons,
either directly or indirectly. A farming system is eminently
complex in that it brings the human subsystem into direct
contact with the physical subsystem in the everyday life
of farming. This is visualized in Fig. 1, the complexity of
which is limited by its own two-dimensional representation.
A change in one holon will eventually be felt across the
whole system and in ways that are often unpredictable. As
can be seen, there are endless alternatives and possibilities;
in effect everything is connected to everything else.
However, in reality many of these connections are mediated
through the filter of the peasant farm household and village
community which may have dealt with such predicaments
before, and depend on their own knowledge, intuition,
reference to deities and the help of friends and relations to
reach a response to a problem. This makes systems analysis
possible in that the complexity of the situation is reduced
somewhat by our own inability to comprehend and analyze
all the possibilities.
In this paper we propose to consider applying
postmodern systems analysis, theoretically, to the GIAHS
in China and in this way demonstrate that it is possible
to “take complexity seriously”. This is an alternative to
the science method of reducing problems to ever smaller
units of analysis, which mostly fail to integrate any new
knowledge into the system, subsystem, or holon in which
it occurs, as well as the system as a whole. The GIAHS
represent a relatively closed farming system which partially
reduces the complexity of the situation. By considering the
potential and known impacts of tourism on village-level
Landscape
Climate
regime
Water
Policy
Economy
Human
Politics
Forest
cover
Land use
Physical
Fig. 1 A depiction of random
holons in a complex farming
system.
FULLER T, et al.: Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity
farming systems, we can examine, at least theoretically, the
impact of tourism as a perturbation in the complex adaptive
systems of GIAHS.
In this theoretical treatment, therefore, we are dealing
with two elements; the farming system called a GIAHS and
the intervention into the farming system called tourism.
These two elements will be discussed individually first,
before they are considered together with the information
that we have available on sample GIAHSs in China.
2 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage
Systems (GIAHS)
A GIAHS is:
“Remarkable land use systems and landscapes which
are rich in globally significant biological diversity evolving
from the co-adaptation of a community with its environment
and its needs and aspirations for sustainable development”.
Parvis KOOHAFKAN, et al. 2011
This prestigious designation by the Food and
Agricultural Organization of the United Nations of an
official GIAHS has been bestowed on six sites in China
and more are waiting designation. Some of these will be
become Chinese provincial designations in the future and
are important ways to bring attention to the special nature
of these long-standing systems. GIAHS exemplify the
intrinsic bond between man and nature though the timeold practice of farming in which knowledge and respect
have been developed over centuries of trial and error. Such
systems are found in different environments from remote
landscapes to semi-urban locations where the threats and
advantages for sustainability vary greatly. GIAHS are
particularly well developed in mountainous terrains where
conditions for agriculture are difficult, at best, and are a
testimony to human ingenuity and patience. This is well
illustrated when the many incursions of natural and manmade interventions—disasters or “perturbations”—are
taken into account (floods, wars, epidemics, famines and
migrations) and considering the high survival rate of such
systems. It is important to note that although the GIAHS
designation has been awarded to certain specific locations,
the “farming system” itself is widespread. For example, rice
terrace landscapes exist unheralded in many inhospitable
areas of South China and include rice-fish and rice-duck
combinations as the agricultural systems of choice.
GIAHS cover a number of landscapes and land use types
in China. The most common is the rice-terrace systems of
central and southern China (Li et al. 2011) Although rice
paddies are common in many areas, it is the mountain type
with rice terraces to husband the water resources that adds
a special dimension to the rice-fish-duck systems (Lu and
Li 2006). There are also maize and root crop-based agroecosystems in north-central China, as well as nomadic and
semi-nomadic pastoral systems in west China. If one adds to
this coverage, the special situations of tea, dates, vineyards
and nut trees, the conditions for village tourism are easily
197
met in many locations (Min 2009 and 2012). The farming
systems are unique, ingenious in many instances, and draw
visitors to view attractive landscapes and experience ancient
village cultures (Sun et al. 2011).
3 The advent of tourism
Among all the privations and afflictions that have affected
rural systems in the world, the industrialization of
economies and the modernization of society have had the
most impact. Industrialization is invariably urban based
and as such draws labor from the countryside to power the
production processes of the city. Rural to urban migration of
migrant workers is the first order of impact on rural systems
in China. In the process, the nonmingong (migrant labourerfarmers) become proletarianized as construction and factory
workers, as wage earners and employees and their children
become modernized within the culture of the urbanindustrial complex. This has brought about some profound
changes to life and livelihood in rural areas as young adults
“go out” and many leave behind their children, women
and the elders in the village (Ye et al. 2010). This creates
a structural change in the demographic composition of
many rural areas. A cycle of exchange is completed by the
remittances that are sent back home to assist with children’s
education, medical expenses for the elderly and to renovate
or improve family dwellings. Many adjustments take place
in village life during this process in the absence of working
age adults. Agriculture is often feminized as women take
over farm tasks and adjust the daily round to accommodate
the new demands on their time for example. Grandparents
continue farming until very old age and become the
guardians of children. Overall, the fundamental relationship
between human and ecological systems at the village level
is adjusted over time. In terms of systems thinking, this can
be called an adjustment to a “stress” in the original system.
A second outcome of industrialization and modernization
is the rise of “travel” as a consumer appetite among the
newly created middle class. As citizens become established
and have some disposable income, it becomes increasingly
fashionable to take holidays and to travel to far off places to
visit ancient sites and classical landscapes. Many of these
are located in rural areas and as a result there is a second
order of backflow of visitors and capital to rural places.
Many of these places are villages. As a result, a further
change has occurred in many village systems across the
country where visitors have come to view, to experience
and to enjoy the cultural activities of local peoples, many
of them ethnic minorities. This represents a seasonal and
occasional backflow of people to rural areas and although
their intent is different from those who left, they are
curiously interested in the agricultural and related cultural
activities of the communities they visit and represent
another form of re-balancing or adjustment in the local
system.
Rural village tourism can also be seen and studied as a
response to a stress in the original agrarian system. Over
198
time tourism creates a set of new conditions that have to
be accommodated or rejected by the system, the only other
option being system collapse. We can examine these options
further by focusing attention on rural systems that represent,
before modernization, optimal conditions of system balance
and sustainability. Globally Important Agricultural Heritage
Systems (GIAHS) have evolved over many centuries and
combine the best sustainable elements of man and biosphere
having withstood and adapted to many perturbations
causing system shocks and stresses. GIAHS represent an
approximation to a closed system and therefore can be
studied theoretically to see what the impacts, adjustments
and rejections might be in the face of the most recent
external pressure, that of tourism.
3.1 Measuring the system impacts of tourism
The introduction of tourism into a GIAHS village system
and all the other villages not designated, but operating
under essentially the same conditions, is an incursion.
An incursion is a new event in the village system and one
which probably follows the “going out” of some village
workers. The effect of going out is one of “absence”, while
tourism brings with it the effect of “presence”. For many
GIAHS, it is the first time in over 1000 years that visitors
have come to the village who are not directly connected
with governments, armies, bandits or traders. If they are
day visitors, they come to see the landscape, eat a meal
and maybe talk with a local informant. They represent a
different person than that which locals are used to. They
might speak, dress and behave differently than locals, such
that the first impact is cultural. Over time it represents a
process of “opening up”, but at the village or township
level. Such contact brings new ideas and possibilities, but
also raises awareness of the “outside” world which might
seem to villagers to be prosperous and desirable. This first
impact has particular effects on youth and can consolidate
their already forming desire to “escape” from the confines
and work routines of village life. In many cases contact with
outsiders is unsettling.
Unfortunately, cultural impacts are hard to measure as
behavioral change may only appear after several years and
one cannot be sure that out-migration of youth for example
is directly affected by the influx of tourists. Be that as it
may, it is clear that with tourism, village life will begin to
change. More anthropological work needs to be done to
understand better the change processes that take place after
tourists have started to come to the village.
The most common way to measure impact is to calculate
the money that visitors spend in the village. This however
is controversial in many places as the bulk of tourism
expenditures are taken by the travel agencies who organize
the travel arrangements and have “deals” with some locals
about where to park, what to see and where to eat. It is
well known internationally that day tourists tend to bring
their own supplies of food and drink and that what they
spend in the village is minimal. The economics of village
Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3, 2013
tourism informs us about the “external” costs and benefits
of tourism, but says little about the economic impact of
tourism on the village economy. In this respect, tourism is
an assumed good.
If we view village culture and economy as two holons,
then the potential impact of tourism can be assessed in
general terms, An example is visualized using Fig. 1. At the
beginning, the early impact of tourism on village culture is
slow and long standing. The impact on the local economy
is also minimal at first as most of the expenditures are
made externally and before the visit is made. Only when
the villagers provide group meals for visitors and when
traditional dancing and singing is performed for them, does
any real money flow into the village. Visitors who stay
overnight have an increased impact and begin to make a
difference on what visitors spend and on the impact they
have on local cultural activities. The type of village tourism
(day tourism, overnight stays, ecotourism) is therefore
important in the calculus of impact. Day tourism is
passive and has minimal effects in the two holons taken as
examples. Overnight tourism has a much greater economic
benefit for the village, although this may flow to only a
few of the more entrepreneurial households. Whatever the
impact, the village takes on a new dimension in its daily
life; a form of “new normal”.
This introduces the importance of time. With the
passage of time, tourism, once introduced will develop
and make increasing demands on the time of villagers,
on their resources and on their ability to accommodate
increasing numbers of tourists. In the economic holon,
increasing amounts of income may have different effects.
Some households will invest the money on new and
better tourism facilities, others will improve their farm
life with new tools, technologies and chemical inputs.
Some will save their money and eventually move to a
new location. All three reactions can have deleterious
effects on the farming sub-system. More land brought
under cultivation will require more irrigation water and
will potentially diminish the water resources in the area
and stress the human system that allocates water and
controls distribution. New and greater amounts of agrochemicals will increasingly affect the groundwater system
and distribute chemical residues, as well as plastic, across
the landscape surface. The opportunity for organic food
production is diminished, ironically just as the demand
rises, especially by eco-tourists, for more natural foods that
are deemed safe and healthy (Altieri and Koohafkan 2004).
Villagers who abandon their land, leave empty terraces,
and unkempt canals. Paradoxically, these villagers are
considered by some locals as winners in the system. With
increased income there is the distinct and ironic possibility
that the very feature that attracts tourists in the first place
is slowly changed and often debased. No tourists want to
see abandoned paddies, overgrown pathways and clogged
irrigation ditches, nor empty houses or closed shops. The
vicious circle of decline is easy to trigger with thoughtless
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FULLER T, et al.: Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity
overloading in one holon and the under-resourcing of other
related holons.
3.2 Tourism impacts: landscape
The impacts of tourism can be tracked in several ways
by examining the connected holons. If we begin with the
landscape holon (Fig. 2), abandoned terraces and water
channel maintenance can be the starting point which may
lead to an adjustment in land use, land distribution, water
management and conservation practices for example. A
study of terrace abandonment might eventually lead to
why the peasants have left their land, and then to the new
opportunities, as perceived by the peasant family, presented
by income from tourism or indirectly from some other
business investment. For example, a truck or a van, perhaps
purchased with income from tourism, will be used to
develop a small transport business. In this process, farming
is abandoned or left to the elders who may let it go later.
Tracking such interconnected events which then become
stories is an anthropological task involving narrative and
ethnography as well as the knowledge we have in natural
science. Of critical importance is to know what is adjusted
in the system when a major change such as tourism occurs,
both physical and human, and whether this adjustment is
likely to lead to greater sustainability of the system or to
some form of deleterious system change or even collapse.
Tracing the cause and effects through the holons is a process
of discovery as there is much we don’t know about complex
systems and how they adapt (or not) to such perturbations
as the incursion of tourism.
3.3 Tourism impacts: forestry
There is a much greater body of work on changes in upland
forest cover and what this might mean for the water system
in rice terraces in many areas of central and southern China.
The conservation of water in such landscapes has also
been studied in conditions of drought (Bai and Min, to be
published). Drought is another type of perturbation that
produces stress in the system. When upland terrace systems
are compared to paddy rice in valley lowlands, the impact
of drought is much less in the ancient upland areas where
forest covers produce great water conservation effects
(Li and Lai 1994). In this case the natural system is selfadjusting, although the medium to long-term effects of such
adjustments are not fully known. Tracing what changes in
the practice of water use in such circumstances as drought,
in the terraces, in the village, in the forest ground cover, in
the flora and fauna is all to be discovered. Most of what we
do know is about change in crop yield in times of drought
and the impact calculation is about rice yield productivity,
and not about sustainability in the system. In drought
conditions, some elements in the holons might be stressed
beyond recovery, others changed, while many are only
adjusted slightly. What also becomes evident is that systems
often have to handle different perturbations at the same
time, in this case tourism and drought.
The issues are necessarily complex as the system
itself, fine tuned over many generations of farming, is
also complex. What we don’t have is a manual of how
the system works best and what the critical elements are
without which the system would not work at all.
What emerges from this theoretical discourse is that
the GIAHSs offer an excellent opportunity to understand
better the relations between human and physical systems.
Given that tourism has been proposed and accepted as a
potential solution to peasant system decline, it is opportune
to examine the different GIAHS from a systems perspective
in which tourism represents a perturbation. Tourism is
slow moving and causes stress in the system, but not
shocks. There is time to formulate man-made adjustments,
while observing the self organizing changes in the local
and regional ecology. However, a number of important
observations must be considered to enable any such
research to take full advantage of systems thinking.
(1) A body of knowledge about individual elements
already exists, but this tends to be fragmented and held
in disciplinary cocoons. This knowledge needs to be
catalogued and made available to the research community.
Topography
Land use
Policy
Regulatory
agencies
Fig. 2 The holons that will affect
and be affected by Landscape
change.
Geology
Forestry
Landscape
Transportation Settlement
Soils
Water
regime
Climate
conditions
200
Most importantly, ways of combining these pieces of
knowledge into greater wholes for understanding more
about system dynamics is required. Using complex dynamic
systems analysis is only one way to proceed in this matter.
(2) A baseline is necessary to determine how the system
operates when it is “normal”, that is before a perturbation
occurs. In any recording of the baseline, analysis should
tell us which parts of the system−which holons−are
most vulnerable to natural and man-made perturbations.
Identifying weak links that exist when the system is normal
will help to understand how they perform when under stress
or in conditions of shock. Surprises may well occur in this
approach, and many often become important “discoveries”.
(3) A fragmented approach to GIAHS will do more
harm than good. Effective study needs generalists, as well
as specialists in science and social science. The biggest
research need is in relating parts of the system together to
see the system as a whole or at least as sub-systems. Only
farming systems research has done this in the past.
(4) Dynamic research needs to be more fully developed.
One of the reasons that a complex adaptive system is
complex is because it is dynamic. Research studies need to
reconcile this with new and better techniques for measuring
change as it occurs, because complex systems are changing
all the time. How this change occurs, at what level (which
holons?) and which changes are beneficial in terms of
system maintenance and sustainability is a critical avenue
of future enquiry. Techniques that hold variables constant
in order to study them more effectively miss the point that
variables are adjusting constantly and in different pathways
in relation to a variety of other variables. Key pathways that
characterize change need to be developed and charted. It
is also essential that these key pathways incorporate both
human and physical components of the system.
(5) Simple regressions are too limited to tell us anything
useful about CASs. Even multiple regressions can only
demonstrate associations between variables and are always
constrained by the quality of the data. For many human
decision-making factors there are only a few reliable
measures yet developed, and so such key variables as
satisfaction and trust are excluded from the analysis. A
village that is dissatisfied or divided over the benefits of
tourism because of a lack of trust (in the authorities, among
themselves) has a very uncertain future, at least as far as
village tourism goes.
4 Summary and conclusions
In order to understand the Chinese GIAHS in a more
full interpretation of their strengths and weaknesses and
especially their resilience, we must learn more about
“taking complexity seriously”. Reducing issues to a simple
problem is a useful scientific technique, but is inadequate in
understanding big picture situations and their multi-layered
dynamics. Allen and Hoekstra (1992) point out that “an
exact, all inclusive definition of hierarchies is less important
than the acknowledgement that scale and perspective,
Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3, 2013
context and content are relevant to understanding nature,
which is more complex than any of our models”.
Thus, research in this field requires specialists and
generalist to work together in multi-disciplinary teams
to piece together their understanding of the system and
how it works, and how it is likely to respond to a stress
or a shock. Frameworks for holding the data together so
that inter-relationships can be measured, monitored and
better understood are needed. Such starting frameworks
can be refined or rejected as the result of feedback from
focused research, but new ways of seeing and dealing with
complexity are badly needed. Sophisticated models can be
helpful as can narratives of village conversations.
Visualizing GIAHS as complex dynamic systems has
many advantages. It forces us try to see the system as a
whole, to understand its many complexities and to focus
on the unknown and surprising elements of the system. In
this way systems study becomes innovative and we begin
to ask different sorts of questions and seek to test new and
innovative methodologies. Seeing heritage tourism in an
agricultural village context as a “disturbance” changes the
way we look at knowledge generation and the utility of our
standard methods. We begin to ask questions of ourselves as
well as of the system.
All views represent knowledge. We must therefore
enhance our scientific knowledge of system components
with the views of different actors; people, governments
and the private sector all at different scales. They may be
considered stakeholders in a complex system in which the
village is the node and its future is at stake. The private
sector view that it represents an opportunity to make money
from tourism, or the opportunity to attract investments for
infrastructure by local governments can be moderated by
the views of villagers. Unless the interests of the people
who will maintain the system are taken into account, then
the long-term sustainability of the system is at risk. Fuller
(2013) and Sun et al. (2009, 2011) have written about the
problems of engaging local people in tourism planning
and management in the Chinese rural tourism context. The
principle of multiple perspectives is of importance when
trying to comprehend the way forward for any form of
human or physical development. Landscapes are basically
inert and await the decisions of man. What formulates
the decisions to intensify, continue or abandon traditional
practices is yet to be more fully understood and perhaps
the use of complex adaptive systems thinking will help to
clarify this and many related issues. As natural disasters
increase and technology constantly alters our modes of
interaction, the impact on our systems of production and
livelihood are more frequently under stress. We must
rise to this challenge with new and imaginative ways of
comprehending how systems work and adapt (or not) to
natural and man-made interventions. Studying the GIAHS
with a systems approach will enable us to get closer to
understanding systems, sub-systems or holons as a dynamic
whole.
FULLER T, et al.: Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity
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作为复杂适应系统的农业文化遗产：复杂性的挑战
Tony FULLER1，闵庆文2
1 中国农业大学 人文与发展学院，北京 100094
2 中国科学院地理科学与资源研究所，北京100101
摘 要：本文首先阐述了农业系统的复杂性，并对农业系统所面对不确定性，以及外部系统的冲击和压力而形成的动态性
进行了分析，提出“复杂适应性系统理论”为研究活态的农业系统，尤其为研究中国的全球重要农业文化遗产（GIAHS）提供
了可能，而这些农业文化遗产系统（或其中某些部分）对于研究抵抗力和自我良性管理具有重要的意义。本文认为当前研究中
的相关方法将会对整个系统的认识产生新的见解，同时避免把系统分解为各组分进行微观研究再重新还原成整体的研究思路。
本文通过综述与GIAHS相关的方法并将旅游引入农村系统（作为一种扰动），认为可以创造新的方法来认识农村发展干预措施
对古老景观的影响，特别是分布在中国农村的许多景观。
关键词：复杂适应性系统；旅游；村落；子整体；理论；扰动