Global Systems Science and Policy

Abstract

The vision of Global Systems Science (GSS) is to provide scientific evidence and means to engage into a reflective dialogue to support policy-making and public action and to enable civil society to collectively engage in societal action in response to global challenges like climate change, urbanisation, or social inclusion. GSS has four elements: policy and its implementation, the science of complex systems, policy informatics, and citizen engagement. It aims to give policy makers and citizens a better understanding of the possible behaviours of complex social systems. Policy informatics helps generate and evaluate policy options with computer-based tools and the abundance of data available today. The results they generate are made accessible to everybody-policy makers, citizens-through intuitive user interfaces, animations, visual analytics, gaming, social media, and so on. Examples of Global Systems include epidemics, finance, cities, the Internet, trade systems and more. GSS addresses the question of policies having desirable outcomes, not necessarily optimal outcomes. The underpinning idea of GSS is not to precisely predict but to establish possible and desirable futures and their likelihood. Solving policy problems is a process, often needing the requirements, constraints, and lines of action to be revisited and modified, until the problem is 'satisficed', i.e. an acceptable compromise is found between competing objectives and constraints. Thus policy problems and their solutions coevolve much as in a design process. Policy and societal action is as much about attempts to understand objective facts as it is about the narratives that guide our actions. GSS tries to reconcile these apparently contradictory modes of operations. GSS thus provides policy makers and society guidance on their course of action rather than proposing (illusionary) optimal solutions.

Taking Systems Thinking to the Global Level: Using the WHO Building Blocks to Describe and Appraise the Global Health System in Relation to COVID‐19

“…Moving forward, we argue that the use of the Building Blocks is an entry point to further analysis of the global health system, as a health system, and to identifying goals and monitoring progress. Other research tools, such as complexity science methods (Borghi & Chalabi, 2017 ; Sturmberg & Martin, 2020 ; Sturmberg et al, 2020 ), and global system science more specifically (Dum & Johnson, 2017 ), can and should complement the use of the Building Blocks to better understand the structure of the global health system and how the interactions between agents in the system and with their environment affect system performance. Such an approach would provide a whole‐system approach, considering system dynamics, the fact the global health system is evolving over time, enabling the prospective consideration of the potential consequences of reform options, and of potential adaptations and transformations to bolster resilience across health‐system scales.…”

Holistic spatial analysis of distributed worlds

“…Understanding the main elements of Global Systems Science is one of the goals of the planned research. The details and more data about global systems can be found in [3].…”

Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy

“…The chapter by Dum and Johnson discusses how complex systems science can be integrated with policy [6]. 'The vision of Global Systems Science (GSS) is to provide scientific evidence to support policy-making, public action and to enable civil society to collectively engage in societal action.…”