Navigating towards sustainable development: A system dynamics approach

Traditional fragmented and mechanistic science is unable to cope with issues about sustainability, as these are often related to complex, self-organizing systems. In the paper, sustainable development is seen as an unending process defined neither by fixed goals nor by specific means of achieving them. It is argued that, in order to understand the sources of and the solutions to modern problems, linear and mechanistic thinking must give way to non-linear and organic thinking, more commonly referred to as systems thinking. System Dynamics, which operates in a whole-system fashion, is put forward as a powerful methodology to deal with issues of sustainability. Examples of successful applications are given. Any system in which humans are involved is characterized by the following essential system properties: Bounded rationality, limited certainty, limited predictability, indeterminate causality, and evolutionary change. We need to resort to an adaptive approach, where we go through a learning process and modify our decision rules and our mental models of the real world as we go along. This will enable us to improve system performance by setting dynamic improvement goals (moving targets) for it. Finally, it is demonstrated how causal loop diagrams can be used to find the leverage points of a system. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Futures 38 (2006) 74–92 www.elsevier.com/locate/futures 0016-3287/$ see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2005.04.005 * Corresponding author. Address: Department of Water Resources Engineering, LTH, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden. Tel.: C46 46 2228134; fax: C46 46 2224435. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Hjorth), [email protected] (A. Bagheri). 1 Tel.: C46 46 2224871; fax: C46 46 2224435. P. Hjorth, A. Bagheri / Futures 38 (2006) 74–92 75