nigel roome - Institute for Managing Sustainability

27 Pages·2013·1.33 MB·English

by  Elke Truyens

1 © Vlerick Business School (c) nigel roome
‘MANAGEMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AS A
SYSTEMS PROBLEM’
‘SYSTEMIC SUSTAINABILITY MANAGEMENT: COMPLEXITY, RESILIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY
MANAGEMENT’ - VIENNA OCTOBER 7-8 2013

PROFESSOR NIGEL ROOME – PROFESSOR OF GOVERNANCE, CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AND
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT - VLERICK BUSINESS SCHOOL
A PROVOCATIVE STARTER QUESTION
If you came across an ancient city in a jungle and
wanted to understand the civilisation that built it
would you?
A. Search to see if you could find the original design
plans and codes somewhere
B. Talk with local villagers in the hope of finding
someone who knew someone who knew the
original designers and residents
C. Import your own building materials and build on
the foundation and then say ‘well this is what it
must have looked like!’
D. Use the word ‘ancient civilisation’ in a grant
application so you could go and do what you
wanted to do anyway
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The ‘ancient civilisation’ that I want to explore
today is ‘sustainable development’ and my
approach is to go back to the original thinking
and lines of argument behind the concept
because they touch directly on the theme of this
meeting ‘systemic sustainability management’.

I then want to spell out four key aspects of a
systems view of sustainable development and
finally draw some conclusions
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ARGUMENT – THE PARADIGM
 Sustainable development was originally
conceived as a ‘systems problem’ that required
solutions operationalized through a ‘systemic
approach’ - this constituted a ‘new paradigm’
for development

 The paradigm was poorly understood

 It was displaced by pre-existing non-systemic
understandings of development that were
extended to sustainable development
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CREATING - PARADOXES
 More and more practitioners and commentators used
the language of sustainability while drawing on old
paradigms of development
 At same time economic and financial globalisation
provided resource intensive and consumptive forms of
development that reinforced the old paradigm
 Weak, inadequate responses to the challenge of
sustainable development made us think this was the
‘real thing’ when it has not been
 So during the past 20-5 years we have witnessed
increasingly devastating cumulative impacts of human
activity on the Planet
 We begin to wake up to that reality
‘Goals and processes’ of sustainable development
remain difficult to understand and elusive to science
and practice
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STRUCTURE
 The original basis for sustainable development

 Set out to explore four key ideas
1. Systems
2. Systems approach to understanding problems
3. Systems thinking
4. Systemic approach to problem resolution

 Conclusions and some implications for research,
education and practice

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BACK TO THE ORIGINS
BASICS – THREE LINES OF THINKING
Problem of
‘Complexity’ arising from the
interaction of open systems
Response - Behaviour
Change for Managing for
Analysis & Structure Development
‘Systems Science & Cybernetics’ ‘People & teams
’
organisations & ecologies
Brundtland Report (1987)

The Earth Summit 1992

Agenda 21 (1990-2)
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WHOSE IDEAS WERE INFLUENTIAL?
‘Meta-problems’ (Chevalier & Cartwright 1966)
‘Wicked problems’ (Rittel 1973)
‘Messes’ (Ackoff 1974)
Club of Rome (Meadows & Randers 1972)
Small is Beautiful (Schumacher 1973)
Stockholm Environment Conference
(1972)
Towards a social ecology
World Conservation Strategy (1981) *
(Emery & Trist 1972)
Referent organizations
(Trist 1983)
* Behind this - Bateson, Boulding,
Agenda 21 (Jim MacNeill & David Runnalls
Ashby, Beer, Bertalanffy, Vickers, 1990-2)
Checkland, Ackoff etc Earth Summit 1992 run as a ‘search
conference’ – Emery & Trist 1st search
conference run in 1959
10 © Vlerick Business School (c) nigel roome