Abstract/Summary

The contents of this special issue have three things in common. First, all draw their methodology from the field of System Dynamics modelling, or SD (Forrester, 1958; 1961; 1968). Second, early versions of the ideas published here were first presented at a workshop that took place in Stuttgart in June, 2023. Third and last, they all relate to the topic ‘Managing Sustainability.’ Each of these commonalities merits brief comment, the first directly below, the remaining pair in subsequent sections. Today, not least in this journal, SD is accepted as a member of ‘Systems Science’, one of the range of approaches that make up that broad and variegated field (Jackson, 2009; 2019). This was not always the case as SD emerged with very little evident support from systems science, drawing primarily on ideas from servomechanism theory (Lane, 2007; 2022), though having a wide range of contemporary influences (Crossett, 2007) and being part of the ‘techno-optimism’ prevalent at that time (Malczynski & Lane, 2023). That said, detailed analysis show how the ideas of SD fit comfortably with other approaches that take an interest in feedback, a core systems notion (Richardson, 1991), whilst the increase in articles in this journal – whether published in previous special issues or as individually submitted research articles – are evidence of the creation of richer connections that exist today (Jackson, 2021). Previous Guest Editorials have made much of the presence of SD papers on the pages of this journal; happily, this is no longer called for, and we can quickly pass on to more notable matters.