solvesustain

Tag: systems thinking

  • 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…

  • 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…