Centre for Complex Systems in Transition – two years on

Yesterday the core CST research team met to reflect on how far we have come since our first strategic retreat in about March 2015 which took place in Stanford. We met for most of the day and one of the issues discussed was progress towards achieving one of our goals, namely the founding of a ‘Stellenbosch School of Thought’. Two major papers have recently been completed by core staff, one on Complex Adaptive Systems by Rika Pelzer, Oonsid Biggs and two colleauges from the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), and the other on transdisciplinary case study research by John van Breda and myself. These papers bring together a decade of thinking within their respective fields. They provide the foundation stones for what we are calling the ‘Stellenbosch School of Thought’ – the first being our conceptual framework, and the second our methodological framework. These two, plus a set of thematic areas (cities, food, socialecological systems, governance, cell systems, entrepreneurship, complexity and systems dynamics) constitute the building blocks of a ‘Stellenbosch School of Thought’. It was incredibly inspiring to work through all these conceptual, methodological and thematic  issues, and to see how much progress we have made. I am also amazed by our impact locally, nationally and globally. We decided to try write a journal article with contributions from everyone followed possibly by an edited collection.