By Duncan Austin

Humankind is a complex system suddenly pitched into adaptive crisis. From this bigger perspective, our ‘first response’ to the crisis has overwhelmingly been a voluntary market-led response under various banners – SRI, CSR, ESG, ‘impact’ etc.

While this voluntary market-led (VML) meta-strategy has been a beneficial, and possibly inevitable, first response, it is becoming clear it is insufficient as an adaptive solution and that its pursuit now forestalls deeper changes required. We need to graduate from a VML strategy to policy and cultural changes that recognize sustainability will also require collective and coordinated constraint.

Systems thinking is inexorably and beneficially on the rise as a complement to the reductionism that has underpinned Western thinking for the last 350 years. With the rise of systems thinking, not only can we better understand complex ecological systems upon which we depend, but also we can understand
ourselves as a still emerging and adapting complex system.

The systems tool of Causal Loop Diagrams suggests that VML is a ‘fix that fails’ – a pattern in which firstorder ‘fix’ actions are offset or even completely overturned by unintended ‘fail’ consequences.

More encouragingly, viewing human self-organization as an emergent layered system indicates that VML has been a possibly inevitable, not unhelpful ‘defence at first depth’. Complex systems adapt by working through ‘fixes that fail’ until they land upon a deeper ‘fix that works’. It is within our capabilities to adapt
in this way, but it implies that we must transition quickly from the initial shallow response of VML actions to deeper responses of policy and culture change that now offer the only realistic means of averting climate and ecological crisis in time.

Some of the actors most powerfully positioned to trigger this recognition are those who have promoted VML strategies over the past two decades, because their public ‘change of mind’ would provide an attention-focusing moment that our first response efforts are insufficient.

If VML practitioners (ESG and impact investors, corporate sustainability officers, etc) wish to create a sustainable world, their most effective next step would be clearly articulate the limits of VML as a strategy and catalyse policy change. Markets cannot adequately address sustainability. Markets, governments and culture might.

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