Introduction

The term ‘system’ is widely used in the policy sciences to denote a field of interest characterised by multiple, interconnected actors (for example, education system, health system, policy subsystem, and so on). In this reconsideration, we argue for the development and use of systems thinking as a way of expanding our understanding of the relationships through which policies achieve their effects. Systemsbased analysis provides an important means for bringing together policy and governance.

This type of thinking is far from mechanistic: indeed in focusing on human action in multiple contexts, it moves beyond reductionism to more nuanced notions of cause and effect (Chapman, 2004). A common response to policy failure, for example, is to tighten control, while more significant causes, such as failures of leadership, funding or communication may be neglected. While systems thinking in the policy sciences is not new (Stewart and Ayres, 2001), after a promising start, policy analysis has failed to provide a clear rationale and structure for the use of this mode of analysis, whether the purpose be prescriptive (analysis ‘for’ policy), or descriptive (analysis ‘of ‘ policy). A reconsideration is timely.

We make two general claims for the approach: firstly, systems thinking is likely to be particularly productive where policy problems defy conventional solutions and unintended consequences are rife. In these situations, systems thinking has the ability to move beyond the specifics of each problem to identify and depict underlying complexity; secondly, in the governance era, sites of policy-relevant action are more likely than in the past to lie outside the formal boundaries of government, and to require complex interactions among stakeholders. The long-running difficulty of implementation – relating policy intentions to effective action ‘on the ground’ – is exacerbated (Chapter 8). In these situations, systems thinking helps the policy analyst to find associations and linkages that might otherwise be hard to discern.

Specifically, when we apply systems thinking:

• • we think about context, the political and institutional setting of the policy in question;

• • we think about scope – what's in, what's out; who's in, who's out;

• • we think about actors (both stakeholders and organisations);

• • we think about interconnections between actors (flows of information, money and influence);

• • we think about interconnections between systems – problems observed in one system may be caused by developments in another;