solvesustain

Tag: systems science

  • exploring systems thinking & sustainability

    “There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance In a 2012 paper, Prof. John Sterman of MIT raises the intriguing question: Is the sustainability movement itself sustainable? Do current approaches to sustainability make any real difference to the long-term sustainability of human…

  • governing sustainability transitions

    In the previous article in this series on sustainability and systems change, we looked at the “drivers” of transition to sustainability, according to recent research. In this article, we will look at the question: how can we “govern” the transition to sustainability? In particular, we will look at an approach called “Transition Management” which, like…

  • the drivers of transition

    What might it “look like” to “achieve sustainability”? It seems to me that this desirable process wouldn’t occur as a “monolithic”, simultaneous, homogenous, all-encompassing global or societal movement, but rather as the converging transitions of many, many different individual systems and sub-systems. These could be, for example, a city’s mobility system, a region’s water system,…

  • evolutionary aspects of the multi-level perspective

    In the last few articles, we examined the need for a “systems science” in order to “achieve sustainability”. We further examined one specific scientific “theory”, the Multi-level Perspective on Socio-technical Transitions (MLP), that has gained prominence over the years as an approach to understand systems change. In this article, we will take a closer look…

  • the multi-level perspective in sustainability transitions

    In the last couple of articles, we motivated the need to look at “sustain-ability” from a  “systems” perspective. How can we use methods of science to examine a community’s water system, a city’s transport system, a country’s food system, or even the “world-system”, to understand how, why and in which specific ways unsustainable outcomes are…

  • the science of systems, the systems of science

    In the last blog post, we looked at what sustainability (or “sustain-ability”) might mean, for different systems in society – such as the food system, the energy system, a local community, a city, the world etc. We saw that for any system of interest, interesting questions could be raised. For example – does the structure…

  • sustain-ability & systems science

    I have been thinking over “what sustainability means” for a while now. I suspect that there is no universal definition for the term. Let’s try to examine it from first principles, then. We might break up the word into “sustain-ability” – the ability of a system of interest – whether a local community, a corporation,…

  • exploring the limits to growth

    In 1972, a group of top scientists from MIT published a ground-breaking book called The Limits to Growth. The researchers, lead by Dennis Meadows, applied the newly created field of systems dynamics to explore what they called the world problematique – the complex of problems affecting the globe including poverty and inequity, environmental degradation, institutional…