Caption: Attacking Institutional Complexity, Step by Step: This diagram provides a roadmap of the approach that we plan to take over about a ten-year period, to build new kinds of capabilities for designing organizations to plan and execute global projects. We will start with projects that have moderate levels of institutional complexity, and gradually increase the degree of institutional complexity that we can model and simulate.

The first step is to study "small, idealized" projects that can be readily understood, with minimal levels of institutional complexity and conflict;

Building on this, we will extend the representation and reasoning in our models to cover the kinds of complexity that would exist when implementing a large, complex global project in a developing country with a project organization consisting of a complex network of participants from different national cultures;

Organizations like the World Bank are rapidly concluding that building capacity for environmental regulation in developing countries is just as important as providing immediate project funding and expertise, but is very difficult to do. Thus, we will begin to look at institution building projects starting in about our third year. These projects bring new kinds of institutional complexity that will extend our modeling and simulation requirements.

Following this we would plan to look at some other kinds of global change projects in developing countries, including projects to develop free market institutions, and projects to promote education and health-care, which have arguably the highest levels of institutional complexity.

By about the fifth year of the project, we expect to begin disseminating methods and tools that can be put to use in designing critical global projects of the next millennium. Reference: Overview of CRGP Research, A Presentation by Prof. Ray Levitt.