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Global Environmental Change 75 (2022) 102544
Available online 31 May 2022
0959-3780/© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Systems thinking as a paradigm shift for sustainability transformation
N. Voulvoulis
*
, T. Giakoumis, C. Hunt, V. Kioupi, N. Petrou, I. Souliotis, C. Vaghela,
WIH. binti Wan Rosely
Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Sustainability
Transformation
Policy
Systemic
Reductionist
Interventions
Vision
ABSTRACT
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted as reference and universal guidepost for transitioning to
Sustainable Development by the United Nations in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Develop-
ment, are intended to be used as a set of interconnected goals and global targets for ‘Transforming our world’, as
the 2030 Agenda is titled. This is a far more challenging task than business as usual; it requires systems thinking
for understanding the conditions that generate and propagate sustainability challenges, moving away from the
reductionist and anthropocentric thinking that created them in the rst place. Taking a systems approach to
addressing these challenges has been gaining currency with academics and policymakers alike, and here we
make the case for holistic, integrated, and interdisciplinary thinking that challenges assumptions and world-
views, crucially based on public participation and engagement, to create the enabling conditions for sustain-
ability to emerge. System transformations require interconnected changes to technologies, social practices,
business models, regulations and societal norms, an intentional process designed to fundamentally alter the
components and structures that cause the system to behave in its current unsustainable ways, a paradigm shift
enabling the transition to sustainability.
1. Introduction
Sustainability challenges are immensely complex (EEA, 2019),
complicated and intricate problems, interlinked in processes of rapid,
dynamic change, creating unprecedented challenges that are funda-
mentally systemic (Ramos & Hynes, 2019). The 17 Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals (SDGs) introduced in 2015 as part of the UN 2030 Agenda
provide a useful normative framework to understand sustainability,
encompassing the vision of a Sustainable Society which is inclusive and
takes into account social, environmental and economic capital and has
the potential to attract public attention and inuence public sentiment
(H´
ak et al., 2018). The SDGs are integrated and indivisible, global in
nature and universally applicable. They call for deep transformations in
every country and yet there is a lack of shared understanding of how the
goals can be operationalized (Sachs et al., 2019). In this context, our
societies and economies need to transform from the current unsustain-
able state onto a sustainable and resilient path (Fig. 1), through an
integrative approach that addresses all 17 SDGs, building on their syn-
ergies and benets while alleviating their trade-offs (IIASA, 2018).
The continuous development and evolution of systems thinking in
the eld of policy and management (Funke, 2010) has seen
environmental policies across the world evolving from narrow, sectoral,
and little coordinated, or even overlapping and conicting, towards
more integrated decision-making (Fiksel et al., 2009; Bone et al, 2011;
Giakoumis & Voulvoulis, 2018a), with the idea of taking a systems
approach to addressing sustainability challenges gaining currency with
academics and policymakers alike (Mansoor and Williams, 2018;
Voulvoulis, 2012; Voulvoulis et al., 2017).
However, despite a prolic growth in environmental laws and
agencies worldwide over the last four decades - a 38-fold increase since
1972 - adverse environmental changes are continuing (Yadvinder et al.
2020), with the opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes in societies
around the world ‘rapidly closing’. In the rst ever global assessment of
environmental rule of law (UNEP, 2019), failure to fully implement and
enforce these laws was shown to be one of the greatest challenges to
mitigating climate change, reducing pollution and preventing wide-
spread species and habitat loss. A few months earlier, the UNs’ Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) had urged rapid action to
transform the global economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no docu-
mented historic precedent’ (IPCC, 2018).
When governments do take action, the complexity of sustainability
challenges makes it impossible to predict how all actors and
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: n.voulvoulis@imperial.ac.uk (N. Voulvoulis).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Global Environmental Change
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102544
Received 9 August 2021; Received in revised form 5 May 2022; Accepted 19 May 2022
Global Environmental Change 75 (2022) 102544
2
stakeholders will react, with even relatively simple regulatory in-
terventions often having unintended consequences. Severnini (2019),
for example, demonstrated how in the United States from 1998 to 2014,
restrictions on the development of hydroelectric projects aimed at pre-
serving ecosystems led to an increase in annual carbon dioxide emissions
of about 1,400 tons for each megawatt of fossil fuel power-generating
capacity replacing hydropower, which is a renewable, relatively low-
emitting source of energy. The opposite effect was seen when the
increasing inuence of climate change objectives led UK government
policy in 2001 to create incentives for people to switch to diesel cars,
based on the CO
2
advantage of diesel vehicles compared to petrol,
resulting in unintended and unlawful levels of air pollution (nitrogen
oxides and particulate matter emissions) in urban areas (ˇ
Cavoˇ
ski, 2017).
With several policies evaluating progress based on outcome in-
dicators, another limitation is captured by what has become known as
Goodhart’s law, when interventions are selected based on their antici-
pated effects on targets and not on delivering the benets they were
introduced for. For example, weight-based recycling targets in the UK,
have seen local authorities improving their performance by offering
mixed recycling collections to maximise the amount of waste collected
for recycling, but reducing the quality and value of materials recovered
due to contamination, -with whole loads being rejected at reprocessing
or sorting centres (Waste & Resources Action Programme, 2017), to the
detriment of material made available to producers for use into new
products; the main benet of recycling waste (Isenhour, 2010; Depart-
ment for Environment, 2019).
The current policy paradigm is also considered inadequate to address
global crises such as climate change, biodiversity depletion, land
degradation, deforestation and so forth (Biermann, 2021). Despite
substantial focus on sustainability issues in both science and politics,
humanity remains on largely unsustainable development trajectories
(Global Sustainable Development Report, 2019). Partly, this is due to the
failure of sustainability science to engage with the root causes of
unsustainability (Abson et al., 2017), and its reliance on an unrealistic
model for nature, where nature is perceived too simply, as a closely
integrated, self-regulating, complex system that works best when left
alone by humans (Laitos & Wolongevicz, 2014), a view not consistent
with its complex adaptive systems nature.
Most policies have been anthropocentric (Biermann, 2021),
-including those on environmental protection- in that their ultimate goal
is to protect and benet humans, considered more valuable than all
other organisms -as opposed to Ecocentrism which nds intrinsic value
in all of nature (Kopnina et al., 2018). Such a worldview of human
exceptionalism and superiority to nature is the basis of the notion that
humans are separate from nature, and ultimately not limited by plane-
tary boundaries (Laitos & Wolongevicz, 2014), which underpins the
optimism of those today who believe that human ingenuity and tech-
nology will ‘come to our rescue’ (Hickman & Banister, 2009). For
Techno-optimists, systems thinking could be just another ‘technology’,
invention, a new approach to adopt, to deal with these challenges. But
how realistic is it to come up and implement these seemingly wondrous
inventions, and how easy is adopting systems thinking to change the
way we do things?
2. The challenge of putting systems thinking into practice
“Competence in systems thinking is implicitly assumed among the
population of engineers, policy makers and managers and in fact, most
technical people will self-identify as systems thinkers. But systems
thinking competencies are not as prevalent as these assertions might
lead one to assume” (Valerdi and Rouse, 2010). Research reveals that,
currently, education does not adequately develop systems thinking
competence in learners (Palmberg et al., 2017). According to Sterman
and Sweeney (2007), even well-educated people with strong back-
grounds in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
do not understand the basic elements of complex dynamic systems,
including feedback, stocks and ows, time delays, and nonlinearities.
Plous (1993) showed that simple, linear cause and effect relationships
were used by people to explain phenomena and often when participants
found an obvious cause they stopped the inquiry process. Time delays in
systems are also misunderstood and this can lead to the justication of
‘wait and see’ attitudes that can exacerbate problems (Sterman, 2000;
Buehler et al., 2002; Faro et al., 2010). Systems thinking performance,
even among highly educated people, can be poor (Valerdi & Rouse,
2010). This has led some to refer to a ‘learning crisis’ (Ndaruhutse et al.,
2019), with several factors converging to challenge education policy-
makers to think in new ways about education provision, with systems
thinking competences higher up their agenda (Education Commission,
2016; World Bank; 2018; Lannon, 2018). While several authors suggest
that incorporating systems thinking in education can benet students to
acquire a more holistic view of sustainability challenges (Hofman-Ber-
gholm, 2018; ˇ
Zal˙
enien˙
e & Pereira, 2021), in programmes where systems
thinking competences have been targeted, available evidence as to their
effectiveness is varied (Verhoeff et al., 2018; Evagorou et al., 2009).
This means that policy makers, not necessarily trained to look at
sustainability challenges holistically or from a systems perspective, may
perceive them through their own disciplinary lens, consequently
employing strategies that are isolated and narrowly focused. This
Fig. 1. The transformational process for the transition to a sustainable world through the achievement of the SDGs (adapted from IIASA, 2018).
N. Voulvoulis et al.
Global Environmental Change 75 (2022) 102544
3
hypothesis aligns with the current ‘environmental policy’ paradigm with
its inherent focus on narrow problem-solving that seems to deemphasise
questions of planetary justice and global democracy (Biermann, 2021),
and to favour instead sectoral solutions, often developed in silos, that
tend to maintain the status quo, missing opportunities for wide systemic
changes (Ramos and Hynes, 2019). Even well-intentioned legislation
aimed at prevention has been careless of potential alternative impacts
(Hunt et al., 2021).
Systems thinking does not exist as an off-the-shelf tool that can be
employed every time we face a complex sustainability challenge.
Instead, understanding how things truly work requires critical and
interdisciplinary thinking, the ability to consider multiple disciplinary
perspectives, analyse the strengths and weaknesses of those perspec-
tives, and integrate their insights to produce a new, more comprehensive
understanding of sustainability. By challenging existing assumptions
and potentially altering boundaries of or between elds, new ways of
thinking about complex challenges can be introduced (Mathews et al.,
2008; Montana-Hoyos & Lemaitre, 2011). “Systems thinking supports
interdisciplinarity as a common denominator of generalizable knowl-
edge useful to build a shared thinking space that cross-cuts the bound-
aries of various disciplines” (Barile & Saviano, 2021). It also relies on
public engagement with science through intentional, meaningful in-
teractions that provide opportunities for mutual learning between sci-
entists and members of the public (Stave, 2002). “Mutual learning refers
not just to the acquisition of knowledge, but also to increased familiarity
with a breadth of perspectives, frames, and worldviews” (American
Association for the Advancement of Science, n.d.]. Getting the public,
policy makers, industry and scientists to come to a consensus in terms of
the complex nature of sustainability challenges in order to bring about
the necessary system changes is a process that requires effort and time,
particularly as it is increasingly recognised that a ‘change of mind’ is
required, ‘a profound shift of awareness’, with the changes needed of the
transformational level of a paradigm shift (Laininen, 2019).
3. Systems thinking for sustainability transformations as a
paradigm shift
The term ‘paradigm shift’ was coined by Kuhn (1962), referring to
the shift in science from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. Kuhn’s work
has since been extensively used to capture system transitions, with Hall
(1993), for example, using the concept to explore the transition from a
Keynesian economic paradigm to a monetarist one. Paradigm shift, ac-
cording to both Kuhn and Hall, happens when the anomalies and
shortcomings of the current paradigm are repeatedly pointed out; pro-
ponents of the new paradigm speak loudly and with assurance about it
and are placed into positions of visibility and power; and energy is
focused on converting those people who are likely to be open-minded to
the change (Ramos and Hynes, 2019).
In practice, the many interlinkages within and between the complex,
multi-functional systems behind sustainability challenges mean that
there are often strong economic, social and psychological incentives that
lock society into its current unsustainable ways (Partid´
ario et al., 2010).
There is therefore an opportunity to inuence the evolution of various
macro-systems in a way that it will change actors’ behaviour favourably
(Nemecskeri et al., 2008). For example, to effectively mitigate the
adverse impacts of current transportation systems, strategies can be
devised to manage demand for passengers and freight through various
interrelated ways (Noussan et al., 2020).
Several authors have explained how mundane patterns of everyday
activities routinely lock people into unsustainable practices, that are
difcult to change, even when proven harmful from a planetary and
sustainability point of view (Henwood, 2019). There is widespread
acceptance that the challenges of transforming inconspicuous habitual
ways of everyday activities need to reect the ways in which people
make their daily lives meaningful, and take into consideration lived
experiences and everyday practices and the ways in which they are
socially organised and culturally patterned (Henwood et al., 2016).
There are also limits to how much a person can deviate from dominant
consumerist norms no matter how reective and concerned they are
(Isenhour, 2010). Much individual behaviour is pre-congured by
existing institutions and socio-material arrangements, which are struc-
tural and must be dealt with collectively (Klintman and Bostr¨
om, 2015).
According to Bostr¨
om (2020), the mechanisms at the level of social life
that serve to reproduce mass and excess consumption must be under-
stood before attempts to change them to build bottom-up the trans-
formative learning capacity needed to achieve and legitimize top-down
reformation or transformation of institutions.
There is clearly a need for the development of policies that promote
large-scale social, political and institutional change, generating options
for deliberate transformations that address societal ills such as
consumerism, and deliver social, technical and policy innovations that
can overcome lock-ins and create incentives towards visions of pros-
perity beyond material sustenance (Bostr¨
om et al., 2019). The potential
of such policies to facilitate new management paradigms that aim to
radically transform production and consumption processes has been
recognised (Bengtsson et al., 2018). Helping people to move away from
consumerism and refocus on ‘experiences, identities, relationships and
values that matter to people’ can be a policy objective for change, one
that facilitates a paradigm shift, ultimately resulting in sustainability. At
the same time policies need to incorporate a mechanism of ‘supportive
governance’ on top of specic policy interventions to ease the devel-
opment of social resilience as well (Parkhill et al., 2015).
4. Reframing sustainability challenges for reaching the SDGs
Sustainability challenges can be conceptualised as the gap between
the current situation (unsustainable state A), and the desired state
(sustainable state D) (Fig. 2), to be better understood from a whole
systems perspective (Voulvoulis & Burgman, 2019). Transformation is
the process of transition from the current unsustainable state (A) to the
desired state (D) as collectively envisioned future state of the system
becoming sustainable (Kioupi & Voulvoulis, 2019). There can be several
means to close the gap or pathways to reach the desired state, but social
difculties arise where such means are not obvious, are not immediately
available, or when there is disagreement over the preferred solutions.
There is a need to ‘take plural pathways seriously,’ as no matter how
specic the context, there is never only one relevant, viable path
(Scoones et al., 2020). Smith & Humphries (2004) emphasise the need
for improved inclusivity and multi-actor participation to provide a
greater understanding of the plurality of perspectives when dening the
gap and evaluating alternative paths, and Funtowicz and Ravetz (1994)
propose extending the peer community to include scientists together
with industry, government, citizen groups and environmental
organizations.
Understanding the complexity of sustainability challenges therefore
requires a shift in problem structuring, transforming the way problems
are dened into a more collaborative process that rst denes the vision
(desired state) (Giakoumis & Voulvoulis 2018b), and then selects the
most appropriate pathway for ‘getting there’, using collective knowl-
edge and skills traversing all disciplines and scales of assessment.
“Vision without action is useless. But action without vision does not
know where to go or why to go there. Vision is absolutely necessary to
guide and motivate action. More than that, vision, when widely shared
and rmly kept in sight, brings into being new systems”, according to
Donella Meadows (1941–2001), a pioneer in systems thinking and
practice (Meadows et al., 1972). A clear, widely shared vision attracts
partners and resources, and aligns action (Zurcher et al., 2018).
Sustainability transition is the pathway, the “radical transformation
towards a sustainable society” (Grin et al., 2010). This is the trans-
formation required for the vision to realise, the subject of a whole eld
of research that has emerged in the past few decades in the context of a
growing scientic and public interest in large-scale societal
N. Voulvoulis et al.
Global Environmental Change 75 (2022) 102544
4
transformations toward sustainability (Loorbach et al., 2017). There are
several analytical frameworks for analysing socio-technical transitions
to sustainability such as ‘Multi-Level Perspectives’ (Geels et al., 2008;
Kern, 2012; Papachristos et al., 2013; Wu et al., 2021), transition
management (Berkhout et al., 2004, K¨
ohler et al., 2019), niche experi-
ments (Sengers et al., 2019; Reda et al., 2021), technological innovation
systems (Markard et al., 2015) and several tools for the development of
pathways, such as backasting (Bibri, 2018; Giessecke et al., 2012;
Mendoza et al., 2017), a participatory process for dening a desired
future (vision) and then looking back to assess what would be required
to make that vision realise (Holmberg and Larsson, 2018).
System transitions can take several decades, as they involve inter-
connected changes to technologies, social practices, business models,
regulations and societal norms and inevitably involve struggles over the
direction and pace of change (Meadowcroft, 2011; Rosenbloom et al.,
2018). Understanding the many factors that cause the system to function
the way it does and having a clear vision and commitment to the di-
rection and pace of change required, is a prerequisite for sustainability
transformation (Sanwal, 2015). The process can be accelerated through
leverage points (places where change needs to occur) and an enabling
environment supportive of change (Meadows, 1999). This includes ac-
tions and strategies to trigger such transformative processes, from co-
ordinated action by governments to innovation in the private sector,
experimentation, and pressure from civil society (Romero-Lankao et al.,
2018). Openness and transparency and diversity and equity for example,
have the potential to transform Government and businesses, strengthen
people’s trust in institutions and encourage greater public participation
in decision-making, and are considered enabling factors for sustain-
ability transformations (CDP, 2020). Social equity, justice and equality
also play a key role in providing a just operating space for humanity, and
can facilitate transformations in that direction (Kioupi & Voulvoulis,
2019).
Governments, politics, and policy are central to sustainability
transformations (Patterson et al., 2017). With positive feedback loops
kicking in as consumers become increasingly familiar with the new
paradigm, green infrastructure built, complementary innovations com-
ing to market, and more favourable policy and regulatory frameworks
put in place, change eventually starts impacting the overall congura-
tion of the system (Fig. 1). Effective leverage occurs where the mecha-
nisms for change are feasible and, when enacted, will shift the system in
a desirable direction - one in which a target outcome is achieved while
minimizing other non-target effects (Kennedy et al., 2018). Systems
thinking helps people see the bigger picture and envision a sustainable
human society, enabling interventions beyond ‘end of pipe’ solutions
and towards addressing the deeper structures and mental models at the
root of unsustainability, creating the enabling conditions for sustain-
ability to emerge.
5. Discussion
Environmental sustainability problems have been at the centre of
policy debates and public concern since the 1970s, and while there have
been some successes, most have not been addressed (Wiedmann et al.,
2020). While systems thinking as a concept has seen its popularity in-
crease over the years, interventions have not been truly systemic, in
some cases due to an overemphasis on systems engineering and
computational efforts focusing more on infrastructure than people
(UNESCO, 2005). Indeed, most interventions to date, classied accord-
ing to their potential for system wide change and sustainability trans-
formation, have been shown to be partially driven by research methods
and problem framings, with ‘deep leverage points’ related to changing
the system’s rules, values and paradigms rarely addressed (Riechers
et al., 2020). A potential reason for this is that most interventions do not
target root causes but tend to deal with symptoms, or target ‘low
hanging fruit’ when new more complex, path-dependent capabilities
need to be developed instead (For´
es, 2019).
Systems thinking means understanding the web of interrelations that
create complex problems, a different way of thinking about our rela-
tionship with the world (Allen et al., 2019), and about how change
happens. It is about understanding what causes the problems we face,
the conditions that support unsustainable behaviour, the root causes of
unsustainability. This goes beyond cause and effect relationships, or
simply applying root cause analysis as a tool. By implying—even inad-
vertently—that a single root cause (or a small number of causes) can be
found, the term ‘root cause analysis’ promotes a awed reductionist
view, with the risk of simple linear narratives displacing more complex,
and potentially fruitful, accounts of multiple and interacting elements
(Peerally et al., 2017).
Sustainability, for example, is “often treated as something to be
attained simply by quantitative assessments, technological improve-
ments, plus whatever behavioural adjustments are needed to ‘bring us
back to sustainability’”, stopping our current ‘misbehaviour’ (Clark,
1994). “Modern H. sapiens is unsustainable by nature—unsustainability
is an inevitable emergent property of the systemic interaction between
contemporary techno-industrial society and the ecosphere”, according
to Rees (2010), explaining that what is blocking sustainability is ‘human
nature, cognition, and denial’. This narrative places too great an
emphasis on our misbehaviour and results in interventions directed at
changing it, while ignoring the reasons behind it. In fact, we seldom ask
why we do what we do, what causes the maladaptive social behaviours
that lead to environmental destruction. If we want indeed to establish
what sorts of behavioural adjustments will ‘work’, we need to rst un-
derstand what drives our current behaviour. On the one side, unless the
biopsychic needs of humans (the ‘needs’ our genes prescribe for us) are
met, humans will misbehave in ways detrimental to their own ultimate
survival (Williams et al., 2021). On the other, such behaviours are
embedded in complex socioeconomic systems outside the inuence or
control of individuals (Ewert, 2020). Individual and collective behav-
iours exist in complex systems, and system structures are often the
biggest barriers to behavioural change (Amel et al., 2017). While science
helps unravel these complexities, we are just starting to realise that we
need to get better at turning behavioural science insights into real
change for sustainability (Reddy et al., 2017). This is not about targeted
campaigns, the use of nudging techniques or other behavioural
Fig. 2. Sustainability transformation as the transition from the current unsustainable state to society’s desired state, using the SDGs as end points (Voulvoulis &
Burgman, 2019; Kioupi & Voulvoulis, 2019).
N. Voulvoulis et al.
Global Environmental Change 75 (2022) 102544
5
interventions (Linder et al., 2018; Ewert, 2020), that often make people
feel guilty (Genevsky et al., 2013) and can have the opposite or unin-
tended effects on how they behave (Lertzman and Baragona, 2016). It is
about increasing our understanding of human behaviours, why people
do what they do, the role of circumstances and the mental models
behind their actions. Using systems thinking to understand and enlarge
citizens’ mental models can improve public policy and market-based
incentives to promote global sustainability (Garrity, 2018).
By contrast, the focus of authorities and governments on tackling
unsustainability has been mainly on public pro-environmental behav-
iour change (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs,
2008; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2011a;
Department for Environment, 2011b; Dobson, 2010), despite the
growing realization that it is our economic system with its mandatory
pursuit of endless industrial growth that is harming the planet, pro-
ducing poverty at a rapid rate, and threatening the basis of our existence,
with the challenge of unsustainable consumption, and by extension
climate change, falling increasingly on the individual as a consumer, a
principal actor and a lever of change (Sheth et al., 2011). Systems
thinking could reveal how distracting such focus is (Shove, 2010), as
well as expose the economic system’s role in our unsustainability. An
investigation of major ‘industrial epidemics’ that constitute a very large
share of the current public health burden, offers a valuable insight on the
topic: “Tobacco, alcohol misuse and obesity have remained such
intractable problems only because our economic system allows free
ranging corporations to use evocative promotion, ubiquitous distribu-
tion, perpetual new product development, and seductive pricing stra-
tegies to encourage unhealthy consumption, the main cause of the
inevitable escalation of lifestyle illnesses such as cancer, heart disease,
and diabetes” (Hastings, 2012). These are maladies that governments try
to prevent by targeting consumers instead, whereas consumption,
although often considered an individual choice, is deeply ingrained in
behaviours, cultures, and institutions, and is driven and supported by
corporate and government practices (O’Rourke & Lollo, 2015). Con-
sumers have responsibility for the consequences of their consumption
and lifestyles, but it is governments that drive mass shifts in culture and
consumption and production patterns. Both businesses and policy
makers are choice architects, and dominant societal values, practices,
and social norms are shaped by policies through regulations, infra-
structure, pricing mechanisms, and education (Kinzig et al., 2013). With
much of the literature on sustainability transformations implicitly also
assuming that they can and need to be initiated, directed, managed and
governed, this might look contradictory to bottom up systemic trans-
formations that have a greater chance of taking place and being
embraced (Patterson et al., 2017). Indeed, ’command and control’ ap-
proaches to systemic solutions fail to recognise transformation as a truly
systemic process that dees the top-down and bottom-up dichotomies
that contribute to controversies and resistance, particularly by those
who are ’being transformed’ (Stirling, 2015). But this is where systems
thinking and public participation can play a major role, as an empow-
ering process for people to handle challenges and inuence decisions
that will impact their lives. This leads to joint decision making about
what should be achieved and how, a vision of a sustainable world that
they have co-created, ‘increasing problem ownership and thus the
chances of both proposition acceptance and implementation success’
(Kirkman & Voulvoulis, 2017).
Systems thinking is about understanding the underlying drivers, the
interactions and conditions that inuence our decisions, helping us
articulate problems in new and different ways and expand our bound-
aries of time and space to avoid or reduce potential unintended conse-
quences. It is the intentional process of understanding how to alter the
components and structures that cause a system to behave in a certain
way, and identifying places where relatively small actions can lead to
potentially transformative systemic changes. Systems thinking can
empower people to realise the power they have, learn for themselves
how to be self-determined, engaged and informed citizens with a clear
vision of a sustainability future they desire. It helps to gain a deep, ho-
listic understanding of sustainability challenges, to develop multi-
pronged strategies that reinforce one another, are sustained over time,
and reect a comprehensive understanding of the major forces driving
and constraining change. Change takes place in a complex political
system made up of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, in-
dividual leaders, and citizens — all connected in countless ways. There
are no simple answers or silver bullets, so we need to embrace the
complexity of sustainability challenges. In a democratic, dynamic, and
diverse society, solving problems depends heavily on informed, criti-
cally thinking, and active citizens. Each one of us remains individually
responsible: to stay informed, engaged, and to keep politicians and in-
stitutions in check. Governments have unique capacities, resources and
authority to identify and agree society-wide goals and targets, to create
institutions and networks, and to facilitate structural socio-economic
change, both via policy interventions and by creating space for the
emergence of alternative sustainable economies. We should hold them
accountable for how well they perform on this.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing nancial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to inuence
the work reported in this paper.
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