A dilemma in critical systems thinking is how to balance a desire for critique to inspire far-reaching transformations in society with the requirement for people to reach accommodations to enable on-the-ground change. Both critique and accommodation are necessary to realise transformations, yet they are often in tension. If critique is undertaken by lone researchers and prioritised over accommodation, then the lack of stakeholder buy-in can lead to a failure of implementation. Conversely, if accommodation is prioritised over critique, then implementation is more likely, but it may be less than transformative due to the need to keep more conservative stakeholders engaged. A strategy to address this problem is offered by Gillian Rose. This paper discusses how her strategy can inform critical systems thinking. It then ends with more general reflections on the value of the work of Gillian Rose for systemic intervention.

Public concern over global climate change and biodiversity loss has accelerated international efforts to restore natural ecosystems through nature-based solutions. Rewilding is a growing conservation approach encompassing the recovery of ecological and trophic complexity through interventions such as habitat restoration and/or species reintroduction. Here we explore the nascent efforts of marine rewilding using a systems thinking methodology to inform a systematic review and iterative thematic analysis. Marine rewilding involves a diverse range of interventions, showing similarities in ecological principles with terrestrial rewilding, yet it diverges from terrestrial rewilding in the scale of initiatives, predictability of outcomes, and the prominence of social inclusion. To make progress in offering unifying concepts, we propose a de nition for marine rewilding: a systemic process requiring deliberate human intervention that involves community participation and ocean stewardship to regenerate degraded marine ecosystems

This is the editorial for a festschrift for Mike Jackson. We begin by outlining six phases of Jackson's research, from 1982 to the present day: an initial critique of soft systems thinking and soft operational research (OR); a proposal for methodological pluralism to overcome the hard/soft divide; a description of an ‘enhanced systems/OR’ that acknowledges the complexities, uncertainties and conflicts regularly encountered in practice; the further development and popularization of his enhanced OR under the banners of ‘critical systems thinking’ and ‘total systems intervention’; the consolidation of his work in three books with mature presentations of his perspective; and a rethinking of the history of both systems thinking and systems science, accompanied by a renewed focus on the implications of his methodological ideas for systems practice. Following this outline, we move on to an overview of the papers in the festschrift, each of which either expands on Mike Jackson's ideas, applies them in new application domains, or critiques those ideas and provides alternatives.

Using two new common (Phaseolus) dry bean varieties developed for UK growing conditions, the BeanMeals project explored how to pursue 'fork to farm' systemic innovation in the food system to transform institutional catering and home-cooking towards healthier diets with lower environmental impact, while also enhancing local and national enterprise. Action research, underpinned by a new systems thinking framework, centred on six primary schools and ten households in Leicester and Leicestershire (UK), set against a review of city-, county- and national-level school food policies. Three demand scenarios were developed, based on increasing UK average daily consumption from 8.5 g to either 17, 34 or 50 g, together with three enterprise opportunities ('Community Enterprise', 'Artisanal Entrepreneurs' and 'Food Giants'), to satisfy these demands in different ways. The benefits and trade-offs of scaling UK beans were analysed, including assessments of overall benefits to health, benefits to the environment (which depend on the methods of land conversion and weed management used), and economic benefits (which depend on the scaling method employed).This article is part of the theme issue 'Transforming terrestrial food systems for human and planetary health'.

Government agencies struggle to address wicked problems because they are open-ended, highly interdependent issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. While both quantitative modelling and qualitative problem structuring methodologies have been used to support interagency decision making in the past, co-designing an effective interagency organization to collaboratively tackle wicked problems is more challenging. Few approaches have been developed to enable such efforts. This paper explains how the viable system model (VSM) was implemented through a board game, which was employed to co-design an interagency meta-organization that would be capable of more effectively collaborating to jointly address a wicked problem: international organized drug crime and its interface with local gangs in Chicago, USA. The board game was developed to make the VSM easier for the participants to learn, given that the cybernetic language and engineering-influenced diagrams in the original literature can be off-putting to leaders and managers. The board game was used as the final stage of a multi-method, systemic approach, which involved boundary critique and problem structuring as well as deployment of the VSM. The research findings indicate that the VSM board game, used as part of a larger mixed-methods systemic intervention, contributes to building trust in the value of systems thinking amongst the participants, and sets up a rich context for collaboration on multi-agency co-design. The game therefore offers significant promise as part of the co-design of interagency responses to wicked problems because it creates an embodied process for stakeholders to learn about the VSM. It also reduces the work involved in this learning. Thus, the game enables an effective appropriation of the VSM language and criteria.

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first summarises the up-to-date knowledge and provides an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion and used as a point of reference by a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes.

In this paper, we propose a research agenda to support the recovery of Alexander Bogdanov's philosophical and systemic thinking that culminated in his magnum opus, Tektology. Our main reason for doing so is to re-address enduring questions about the unity of science and the unity of the systems paradigm. Since the turn of the new millennium, there has been renewed interest in the ideal of the unity of science. General system theory (GST), cybernetics and complexity science are three significant intellectual sources inspiring this renewal. It is not unusual for these ideas to be grouped under the umbrella terms systems science or systems thinking, which are two ways to present a single systems paradigm, and we will explain why its "unity" is both necessary and problematic. Bringing Bogdanov's work back to address the unity question can help us to progress toward unity in diversity.

Adaptation to climate change is impacted by a range of interrelated processes operating from local to global levels. There are often significant disconnects between different people’s perceptions of respon- sibilities, capabilities and motivations, and divergent understandings of how the system works across actors, sectors and levels of governance. This results in misalignments of policies and practices, plus in- effective flows of resources and knowledge across the network of climate adaptation actors. As these disconnects are rooted in deep misunderstandings of the grounded realities of different actors, an expe- riential process of mutual discovery is required to build shared understanding and mutual respect. While it is common in the literature for people to talk about multi-level governance, most existing planning processes involve the production of separate plans at each individual level, based on the often-mistaken assumption that they will aggregate into an effective multi-level approach. This paper presents a new, multi-level integrated planning and implementation (MIPI) process, bringing together diverse actors from community, district, regional and national levels in the same workshop. The MIPI process creates a safe space that allows participants to interact directly in conducting systemic, cross-level analyses, as well as the multi-level integration of policies, plans and programs. The paper describes how the MIPI process was designed and facilitated in Ghana to address climate change, agricultural development and food se- curity. This methodology has potential for much broader applicability to complex, multi-level planning and implementation processes.