Governing in the Anthropocene: What Future Systems Thinking in Practice?

Abstract

The revealing and concealing features of the metaphor 'earth as Anthropocene' are explored in an inquiry that asks: In the Anthropocene what possible futures emerge for systems thinking in practice ? Framing choice, so important yet so poorly realised, is the starting point of the inquiry. Three extant conceptual pathway-dependencies are unpacked: governance or governing; practice or practising and 'system'. , New data on the organisational complexity within the field of cybersystemics is presented. These issues are illustrated by means of a research case study that sought to transform situations of concern so as to realise systemic water governance as a product of the transformation. Several new 'imaginaries' are proposed as novel institutions and practices to facilitate systemic transformations; these include systemic co-inquiry and institutional recovery. It is argued that future systems research can be understood as the search for effective 'imaginaries' that offer fresh possibilities within an Anthropocene framing.

Re-Staging La Rasgioni: Lessons Learned from Transforming a Traditional Form of Conflict Resolution to Engage Stakeholders in Agricultural Water Governance

“…The La Rasgioni event gave institutional representatives the chance to understand what kind of improvements are needed to support systemic and adaptive water governance, the entrepreneurs to be listened to by institutions, and researchers to facilitate this dialogue and collect more comprehensive data. Ultimately, the process helped all participants to understand that there are different normative systems and institutions besides the formal national and supranational ones [74][75][76]. These systems, developed at the local level, do not necessarily consist of written norms; however, stakeholders might consider them reliable instruments that help them to deal with existing conflicts of interest.…”

“…In reporting on a decade of social learning inquiry in the context of water management internationally [73], some of the authors of this paper made a case for investing in local systemic innovation through social-learning praxis design [74]. The range of insights into the different aspects of water governance provided by La Rasgioni and its ability to inspire similar activity in other contexts suggest that it could provide an example of the kind of systemic innovation that could be worthy of further investment in co-designing pathways for sustainable development at the community level.…”

Managing the Planet: The Anthropocene, Good Stewardship, and the Empty Promise of a Solution to Ecological Crisis

“…However, both the term Anthropocene and the discourse that commonly surrounds it are, as has been widely noted, highly problematic [8,14,16,17,32,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] obscuring as much as it reveals, reifying the same Cartesian dualism separating humanity from nature that it professes to transcend, misinterpreting and misrepresenting historical change, variability, and conflict, and agglomerating and homogenizing humanity as uniformly and innately at odds with and destructive toward its natural surroundings and the other beings that reside within them. These views imbued within the Anthropocene concept are tied to its employment as a political device for the Anthropocene literature advances more than a value-free name, if there can be such a thing, for the epoch; but, rather, the Anthropocene simultaneously advances certain responses to ecological crises.…”

“…Moreover, the biodiversity already lost will take millennia to replace, and the species lost can never be replaced. Truly, the "Anthropocene" or, rather, the Capitalocene [38], has permanently etched itself into the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, and geology remaking the planet and altering the course of nature forever 44 .…”

“…[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. However, each proposal suffers from the same limitations; first, these proposals do not address the drivers of ecological crises but merely their result, and second, each proposal is a partial measure only addressing one element 44 Indeed, it appears that we have entered into what Bruno Latour [88] refers to as the "new climatic regime", wherein there has been a profound and irreversible shift in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature with the physical world having become unstable, refusing to be seen as a passive stage for our activities or to simply bend to our wills. 45 See also, Altvater [40].…”