# Stability and Sustainability of Resource Consumption Networks

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability and sustainability of resource consumption networks, providing theoretical criteria and numerical simulations to inform sustainable resource governance policies.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel framework distinguishing stability from sustainability and derives conditions linking network structure to these properties.

## Key findings

- Derived sufficient conditions for network stability.
- Established criteria for sustainability based on social network interactions.
- Numerical simulations support analytical results.

## Abstract

In this paper, we examine both stability and sustainability of a network-based model of natural resource consumption. Stability is studied from a dynamical systems perspective, though we argue that sustainability is a fundamentally different notion from stability in social-ecological systems. Accordingly, we also present a criterion for sustainability that is guided by the existing literature on sustainable development. Assuming a generic social network of consuming agents' interactions, we derive sufficient conditions for both the stability and sustainability of the model as constraints on the network structure itself. We complement these analytical results with numerical simulations and discuss the implications of our findings for policy-making for sustainable resource governance.