CSSSA - Oct 14 Webinar
CSSSA - Oct 14 Webinar
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Dear CSSSA community,
Join us for our webinar with Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey) about Policy in a complex world: towards complexity-aware policymaking
🗓️ Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2026
🕚 Time: 10:00 AM Eastern Time
💻 Location: Zoom (link provided upon registration)
Abstract: Over the last ten years, we have been working with government departments and agencies to co-design policy evaluations and appraisals. Policymaking is hard, especially if one works within the conventional framework of a ‘policy cycle’ that implies an almost linear progression from setting objectives through policy design to implementation and evaluation, and with appraisal methods such as cost-benefit analysis. In this talk, I’ll argue that policy is best considered as a complex system with all the characteristics of such systems, and suggest how computational social science can provide methods that are more appropriate to complex policymaking than the conventional ones. But I will also explain why such approaches, most of which are not novel, face resistance and have so far not been widely adopted.
Bios: Nigel Gilbert is a computational social scientist at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. His research interests span a wide range of topics, including environmental social science, innovation diffusion, collective behaviour, and the development of public policy. Professor Gilbert's undergraduate training was in engineering, but he was drawn to the social sciences and obtained a doctorate in sociology from the University of Cambridge. This interdisciplinary background has been a hallmark of his career, integrating computational methods into sociological research. In 1997, he founded the Centre for Research in Social Simulation (CRESS) at the University of Surrey, a leading hub for the development and application of agent-based modelling. He has also served as the Director of the ESRC Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN), a research centre focused on developing methods for the appraisal and evaluation of complex social and environmental systems.
He has published numerous books and articles on computational social science, social simulation, and sociological research methods. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) and has been President of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA). His contributions to sociology and computational social science have been widely recognized. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Chartered Engineer, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2016, he became a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to engineering and the social sciences.
We look forward to seeing you there,
Andrew Collins is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: CSSSA Webinar October 2026 gilbert
Time: Oct 14, 2026 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81363140169?pwd=p80t6fa6uCNH2g1TQfRFTfYOh5TA1Q.1
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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81363140169?pwd=p80t6fa6uCNH2g1TQfRFTfYOh5TA1Q.1&mynotes=on
Meeting chat link
https://us02web.zoom.us/launch/jc/81363140169
Meeting ID: 813 6314 0169
Passcode: 544219
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