In the economy as in ecosystems, one tipping point can lead on to another. Creating cascades of change throughout the global economy is perhaps the only imaginable way we could make the transition to zero emissions at the pace required. This should be the focus of climate change diplomacy throughout this decade. If enough of the world joins in, we might just have a chance.

When we study technology transitions of the past – the shifts from horses to cars, from cesspools to sewers, from traditional farming to intensive agriculture – we can see how they were enabled and accelerated by government policy. Coordinated action by groups of countries could accelerate change even more – through faster innovation, larger economies of scale, and level playing fields where needed. International cooperation of this kind could dramatically accelerate low-carbon transitions in each of the greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors of the global economy. Until now, it has barely been attempted.

Economics is not just about the allocation of scarce resources – how to ‘divide up the pie’. It is also about the creation of novelty, and the formation of new structures – how to make a pie in the first place. The new science of complexity, allied to old ideas of political economy, can help us understand how to create and change things quickly and at large scale. New economic thinking of this kind predicted the global financial crisis, but has barely begun to be applied to policy. It could transform the way we respond to climate change.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics, and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

Systems approaches were an early part of the development of norms research as a subfield of International Relations but have been eclipsed by approaches which emphasise the role of actors, processes, and relationships. However, with new scholarship beginning to explore complex interactions of different norms and their relationship to the structure of the international system, the time to reassess existing systemic theories of international norms is now. This chapter traces the use of different types of systemic norms theory, including the norm life cycle, norms-as-structure, biological and ecological understandings of norm interaction and evolution, and complex systems theory (including regime complexes). By understanding international norms as emergent properties of a complex international system, we focus scholars’ attention on how the international system itself can affect the emergence, diffusion, contestation, and evolution of international norms and vice versa. The chapter finishes by employing a systems approach to understanding norm challenges regarding the rule of law.

This chapter extends the consideration of the changing global burden of diseases and discusses what is required to mount an effective response to public health challenges, particularly in countries where people are living in extreme poverty. It considers the role of international development assistance and the responsibilities of the international community in improving the health of poor people.

This book explores some implications of studying international relations from a systemic perspective. This chapter takes on the preliminary tasks of defining systems, identifying distinctive characteristics of systemic explanations, and situating systems approaches in a broader context of relational framings. A system is a bounded set of components of particular types, arranged in definite ways, operating in a specific fashion to produce characteristic outcomes, some of which are emergent. The arrangement and operation of the components produce “emergent” “systems effects;” properties and outcomes that cannot be fully understood through knowledge of the parts considered separately. I emphasize the relational character of systemic explanations and their reliance on mechanisms and processes, in order to foster developing a relational processual systemic perspective within a pluralistic IR.

IR typically understands levels as levels of analysis that produce analytic/reductionist (rather than systemic/relational) explanations. Causes, separated by levels, are looked at as independent variables understood as distinct sources of explanation. Systemic explanations rely instead on related elements and levels of organization that are (understood to be) in the world (not just convenient epistemic devices). Systems approaches claim that parts on one level are organized into higher-level wholes that are themselves structured parts of still-higher-level wholes. (For example, subatomic particles, atoms, elements, chemical compounds.) The chapter concludes by examining the implications of a levels of organization framing for four important metatheoretical issues: micro–macro relations, the agent–structure problem, the natures of individual human beings and social groups, and the natures of individual and group identities.

The life sciences and social sciences typically study “complex adaptive systems:” nonlinear, self-organizing, adaptive, multilevel, multicomponent systems in which dense interconnections between elements produce irreducible/emergent systems effects. Systems and their components are partially (in)separable: they can be fully understood neither solely in terms of their parts (some outcomes are emergent) nor solely in terms of the whole (the character of the parts is essential to the nature of the whole). Important implications of a complex adaptive systems perspective for IR include a new view of international systems and their structures; a distinctive understanding of social continuity and social change; new perspectives on levels, theory, and explanation; new tools for comparative analysis; renewed attention to hierarchy; and a distinctive understanding of globalization.

Multilevel multicomponent complex adaptive systems are not reducible to the sum of the causal effects of independent variables. Causal inference, which has a privileged place in contemporary IR (and many other social sciences) cannot address systems effects, which arise from interdependent elements and operations (not the impact of independent variables on dependent variables). Systems effects explanations explain why by showing how. They identify mechanisms and processes of causation. They thus are able to establish causal efficacy; that is, show how processes produce – actually cause – outcomes (rather than merely identify some elements that are part of an unspecified causal process). Such an understanding leads us away from a “laws and theories” conception of science, which remains popular in Physics and Chemistry, towards a “models and mechanisms” understanding, which predominates in the life sciences (which, on their face, seem a much better model for the social sciences).

This and the following four chapters address the systemic/structural theory of Kenneth N. Waltz. Despite extensive criticisms of its details, Waltz’s account of the nature of system, structures, and systemic/structural theory continues to predominate in contemporary IR. This chapter shows that, despite its systemic starting point, Waltzian structural theory is thoroughly analytic. Waltz replaced components arranged and operating as parts of a structured whole with a reified structure that exerts causal effects on units that interact with one another and with the structure. The resulting one-sided explanation of the actions of “units” by “the system” reduces systems to mere environments of autonomous actors (whose activities are not constituted, generated, or structured by being parts of a system but are simply constrained by external “system-level” forces).

The remaining chapters of this book begin to sketch a new systemic/relational perspective and illustrate some of its implications and attractions. Like systems approaches, relational approaches in contemporary IR, which employ frames such as networks, fields, practices, and assemblages, stress the arrangement of parts of wholes. A systems perspective, however, highlights a tendency among relationalists to overemphasize relations and underemphasize processes. (The frame “relationalism” draw attention away from processes and usually leaves obscure how relations and processes are related.) I argue for a systemic/relational perspective that understands social systems as configuring configurations that configure. And I argue that these hierarchically layered assemblages can best be understood through relational processual explanations.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

In the economy as in ecosystems, one tipping point can lead on to another. Creating cascades of change throughout the global economy is perhaps the only imaginable way we could make the transition to zero emissions at the pace required. This should be the focus of climate change diplomacy throughout this decade. If enough of the world joins in, we might just have a chance.