Relational policy design and enactment: exploring intersections with cybersystemic praxis traditions

The framing for this theme refers to “Knowing, Intervening and Transforming in a Precarious World”; containing, as it does, three verbs, this framing I will argue is concerned with praxis, or theory informed practical action. Drawing on developments within interpretive, constructivist, action-research oriented turns within cybernetics and systems scholarship (hereafter cybersystemics) I wish to explore why these three verbs only make sense in relational terms. The heuristic question ‘what is it that we do when we do what we do?’ (Ison 2010) is used as a means to further this exploration. My exploration is built on the premise that the aim of this theme “is to facilitate, widen and deepen understandings of the theoretical, empirical, and methodological ways in which relational approaches to policy analysis enable us to understand, intervene in, and transform our precarious world”. Figure 1. A heuristic model of some of the different influences that have shaped contemporary cybernetics and systems (cybersystemic) approaches and the lineages from which they have emerged. This Figure is best read from right to left in the first instance. Down the right-hand side are a set of contemporary systems approaches which are written about, put into practice and sometimes taught. Some names of people (practitioners) are added who are particularly associated with approaches. The approaches are also organised from top to bottom in terms of what can be perceived to be common commitments, or tendencies, of a majority of practitioners within the given approaches to seeing systems as entities (ontologies) or heuristic devices (epistemologies) (Source: Ison and Schlindwein 2015).[ Using Figure 1 as a springboard I will explore how different praxes, arising from certain cybersystemic traditions, might contribute to the aims of this theme and illuminate how in future ‘relational approaches’ might come to be understood and enacted. Research over the last 20 years in cybersystemic praxeology, including systemic governance, or governing (Ison et al 2015), will be used to illustrate and offer conceptual and praxis connections with policy analysis, design and enactment. In addition experiences and insights deriving from 40+ years of designing supported open-leaning experiences for mature students of Systems will illustrate my arguments (Ison and Blackmore 2014). Ison, R.L. (2010) Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate-Change World. Springer, London and The Open University. Ison, R.L. & Schlindwein, S. (2015) Navigating through an ‘ecological desert and a sociological hell’: a cyber-systemic governance approach for the Anthropocene, Kybernetes, 44 (6/7), 891 - 902. Ison, R.L. & Blackmore, C. (2014) Designing and developing a reflexive learning system for managing systemic change. Systems Education for a Sustainable Planet Special Issue, Systems, 2(2), 119-136 (doi:10.3390/systems2020119 ). Ison, R.L., Collins, K.B. & Wallis, P. (2014) Institutionalising social learning: Towards systemic and adaptive governance, Environmental Science & Policy 53 (B), 105–117.