Peter Stigson

Background

About Peter Stigson

My focus is on sustainable development, systems analysis, resource efficiency, policy analysis and organisational development. My main interest lies in understanding how synergies and trade-offs between different sustainability goals and stakeholders occur and can be handled. Both in society and in organisations. The purpose being to move from the silo approaches typically applied in policymaking and business decisions. Through better systems understanding we can build resilience and sustainability across sectors and business areas. This is urgent in order to achieve efficient and effective sustainability agendas and to avoid technological lock-in and sunk costs. Resource efficiency and circular economy is one way to approach such systems analyses, focussing on value chains, resource chains and resource nets. One interesting systems approach are nexus analyses that study interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs between energy, water and land-use systems. This provides an ecosystem based resource efficiency, seeing our ecosystems as the fundamental building block on which we build our societies. This complements circular economy and its main focus on materials already in the social systems, and minimising the need for additional ecosystem resources. Policy analyses also provide a basis for systems understanding, seeing that our policy approaches need to provide better steering towards systems governance. This includes how policymaking processes and policies can be designed to deal with inherent systems complexities and hence need for broad expert input from society as well as innovation. We are moving towards a resource and pollution constrained world where sustainable solutions cannot be provided in silos, rather through benefiting from systems synergies and bridging trade-offs. To move towards sustainable societies and organisations, a broad understanding of these and other challenges must be implemented on strategic and operational levels.