System Thinking Perceived to ensure Community-Led Development

Development practitioners could demonstrate how Systems Thinking could work at the grassroots level to promote community-led development for lasting solutions in economic and social change. Integrating community-led development and systems thinking could share an interest in transdisciplinary efforts that bring together practitioners, citizens, government, grassroots society, and private sectors to implement contextualized actions that promote adaptive sustainable development across citizens and ecosystem interfaces. A key operational element underlying the integrated approaches to development is the use of Systems Thinking as a set of tools for integration. Furthermore, the process could shape human behavior to adapt to a community-led development approach. In this book, we discuss the relevance of community-led development, origins, and epistemology of Systems Thinking and claim that participatory modeling, informed by both systems theory and expertise in facilitating engagement and social learning that ensure sustainable social and economic change at all levels. Participatory modeling is iterative and adaptive, which is necessary to deal with complexity in practice.