Juan's research questions are oriented to understanding emergent patterns, from regime shifts (abrupt, long lasting, hard to reverse changes) in ecological systems to collective action in society. In the long term, his research agenda intents to answer basically two questions. First of all, he would like to study which variables would indicate changes in the resilience of different social-ecological systems. On the other hand, he wants to explore how misperceptions of feedbacks in system dynamics leads to misfit governance strategies, poverty and rigidity traps, market failures as well as conflicts between stakeholders.
Currently Juan is doing a global assessment of regime shifts. As part of his PhD project, he is studying what are the main causes of regime shifts globally and the main bundles of ecosystem services affected. By combining modeling and network analysis, he wants to identify which regime shifts are more likely to happen, which cascading effects should we expect. Although knowledge on regime shifts is growing, very little is known about how often or where they may happen. Juan wants to contribute to a broader political debate by informing managers where are they likely to occur and what are our chances of avoid their unintended consequences.
Juan also serves as course coordinator for the Resilience Research School. He's member of the Young Scholar Complex System Society and the group of Environmental Economics and Natural Resource Management at Los Andes University (Colombia). He enjoys running and climbing.
