The culture of the 1970s in the United States of America was progressive and revolutionary. Due to various events that were unfavorable to the public, U.S. citizens began to lose trust in their government. Signs of the public's revolt and dissention began to show in laws and propositions voters passed. In California, Proposition 13 was one of many anti-tax laws taxpayers voted for to cut back the control of the government. As a result, revenues for public services and improvements decreased and maintenance allocations for infrastructure systems were considerably reduced. Fast-forwarding to today, infrastructure systems in the U.S. are reaching their retirement period and are requiring extreme maintenance and attention. Los Angeles has been experiencing severe water main breaks in its water distribution system for several years now, but the city is lacking funds to replace the aging pipes. The lack of funds paired with aging infrastructure indicates there is a flaw in the forecasting analysis techniques used today to project infrastructure costs. Therefore, an alternative discounting function to the exponential is proposed: the hyperbolic discounting function. A comparative analysis was performed using a hyperbolic and an exponential discounting function. The two functions were calibrated over the course of 50 years and the parameters r and a were determined. Then the discounts were applied to a 50-year expenditure projection for pipe replacements of a water distribution system. The present value was computed with each discount function and results were obtained. By year 50, the hyperbolic function yielded a higher present value of $25.06 million and the exponential function yielded a present value of $14 million. These results lead to the conclusion that the hyperbolic discounting function is the preferred methodology when calculating long-term expenditures, especially those dependent on tax revenue.

The purpose of this research was to address the viability of a monoculture to polyculture agricultural land-cover transition within the context of the palm oil industry in Malaysia and Indonesia. A lifecycle assessment was used as a framework in the Cradle-to-Gate methodology used to understand sustainability hotspots, develop four future scenarios, and to measure three chosen indicators for metric changes. The four scenarios included a business-as-usual, perfect world, and two transition scenarios highlighting greenhouse gases, bio-control chemicals, fertilizer-use, and crop yield as indicators. In the four scenarios, a 1000 ha of plantation land with 140,000 palm oil trees created the backdrop for investigating nutrient cycling, cultivation methods, and the economic trade-offs of a transition. Primary literature was the main source of investigation and a wide-variety of current polyculture research helped create tangible data across the four scenarios. However, polyculture failed to address the socioeconomic barriers present in the governance, business-state, and regulations within this industry and region. An institutional analysis was conducted to investigate the political, financial, and regulatory barriers in this industry and recommend changes. It was concluded that while polyculture is an important form of environmental sustainability and can increase crop yield, the socioeconomic structure of the industry is the largest barrier to change and implement polyculture. In order for this social structure to change, it was recommended that the regulatory institutions, such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), reframe their pressure points and instead focus on the interconnectedness of logging and palm oil companies with the regional governments.

The resilience of infrastructure essential to public health, safety, and well-being remains a priority among Federal agencies and institutions. National policies and guidelines enacted by these entities call for a holistic approach to resilience and effectively acknowledge the complex, multi-organizational, and socio-technical integration of critical infrastructure. However, the concept of holism is seldom discussed in literature. As a result, resilience knowledge among disciplines resides in near isolation, inhibiting opportunities for collaboration and offering partial solutions to complex problems. Furthermore, there is limited knowledge about how human resilience and the capacity to develop and comprehend increasing levels of complexity can influence, or be influenced by, the resilience of complex systems like infrastructure. The above gaps are addressed in this thesis by 1) applying an Integral map as a holistic framework for organizing resilience knowledge across disciplines and applications, 2) examining the relationships between human and technical system resilience capacities via four socio-technical processes: sensing, anticipating, adapting, and learning (SAAL), and 3) identifying an ontological framework for anticipating human resilience and adaptive capacity by applying a developmental perspective to the dynamic relationships between humans interacting with infrastructure. The results of applying an Integral heuristic suggest the importance of factors representing the social interior like organizational values and group intentionality may be under appreciated in the resilience literature from a holistic perspective. The analysis indicates that many of the human and technical resilience capacities reviewed are interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent in relation to the SAAL socio-technical processes. This work contributes a socio-technical perspective that incorporates the affective dimension of human resilience. This work presents an ontological approach to critical infrastructure resilience that draws upon the human resilience, human psychological development, and resilience engineering literatures with an integrated model to guide future research. Human mean-making offers a dimensional perspective of resilient socio-technical systems by identifying how and why the SAAL processes change across stages of development. This research suggest that knowledge of resilient human development can improve technical system resilience by aligning roles and responsibilities with the developmental capacities of individuals and groups responsible for the design, operation and management of critical infrastructures.