The phosphorus-lake system allows clarity that has heuristic value for other, more densely packed systems, including spruce budworm or human settlement in tropical forests. The explanation of causality behind the complexity will remain more elusive, but this paper also helps us get closer to understanding current systems of management and their possibilities. Explaining the causal as well as the descriptive aspects of human-impacted ecosystems should be our goal. Assuming that agents know their interests and that they participate attentively in resource management is problematic as a representation of the world. Discounting the future, for example, varies with agent perception, but it also varies with expected policies.
Power is also typically absent from agency models, but always present in political systems.
A political model of power with the elegance of the Carpenter-Brock Agency Model would be a great companion to our understanding of management and resilience. This should not suggest that power is a nicety that these models can do without. More specifically, in the Carpenter-Brock market manager model, it is interesting to aggregate simply, as rational choice models do, to say that the aggregate of market management is the sum of individual market managers' actions. Yet, we know that such properties do change behaviors. Recognizing that simple models cannot necessarily reflect all that, future models of human behavior must challenge or at least question rational expectations.