Prompt two: Identify a ‘wicked problem’ that matters to you. Diagram or map the system that produce this undesirable state; you may make your own figure or analyse a figure that has been made by someone else. Make an argument for how this map or diagram could be useful for responding to the problem. Critically reflect on this analysis.
The UK is off track to achieve Net Zero by 2050 (CCC, 2024). In response, the UK government has launched a mission to make Britain a clean energy "superpower" by 2030—establishing energy independence, cutting costs for bill payers, and creating 650,000 clean energy jobs (Labour, 2024). However, with a growing deficit of more than 200,000 "green-skilled" workers in the energy sector, the incoming green talent pool needs to at least double in size to keep up with this projected demand and deliver a workforce that can achieve clean, secure energy by 2030, Net Zero by 2050, and capture the "economic opportunity of the 21st century" (PwC, 2023; LinkedIn, 2024; Skidmore, 2023).
This paper uses Foster-Fishman, Nowell & Yang's (2007) framework for transformative systems change in combination with Donella Meadows' "Places to Intervene in a System" (2015) approach to analyse the root causes of the green job deficit and argue why systems thinking is a useful tool for designing future policy interventions to address it.
Complex socio-technological sustainability transitions demand unprecedented levels of transformation, the scale and pace of which create vast mismatches between socio-economic systems that are unable to adapt to new conditions (Geels, 2024). These mismatches ultimately lead to significant socio-economic turbulence during periods of change, resulting in job losses, skills obsolescence, and geographical shifts (Perez, 2002). In the case of Net Zero, it is estimated that around 4 million workers—over one-eighth of the UK workforce—will need to be reskilled, 240,000 legacy roles will be lost, and 1 million new roles will be created across every sector by 2030 (Bain, 2023).
Socio-economic turbulence at this scale places a sharp focus on policy interventions that drive sustainability transitions (Emden, Evans, and Murphy, 2023). Labour’s clean energy mission, to make Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030, is a response to this discourse–promising to "double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind" (Labour, 2024). It is an example of leveraging "state infrastructural power" to create the conditions needed for successful shifts in policy by articulating challenges in a way that speaks to the public, builds coalitions, outlines a vision for the future and, importantly, strikes at an opportune moment to act (Mann, 1984; Blesh, 2019). The intention is to galvanise the action, partnerships, risk-taking, and investment from public, private, third-sector, and civil actors required to drive systems change from the bottom up (Mazzucato, 2017).
To deliver this mission, Labour has committed to create 650,000 new clean energy roles. This means that around 300,000 new workers will need to be attracted and recruited into the energy sector (ONS, 2024). However, with more than half of the existing energy workforce needing to be reskilled and slowing growth rates of employment in the industry, there is an emerging deficit of more than 200,000 green-skilled workers. This deficit suggests the education, skills and employment systems that supply the UK workforce are unable to adapt to the scale and pace of the change required to meet the intended outcomes (Skills England, 2024; PwC, 2024). It is the interdependencies between these systems and their programmatic complexity that make the green job deficit a ‘wicked’ policy problem (Peters, 2017).
"Systems thinking" is a powerful way of better understanding the underlying systemic root causes and complexity of ‘wicked’ policy problems. Foster-Fishman, Nowell & Yang's (2007) framework for transformative systems change is a useful starting point for analysis by looking to understand and identify the fundamental elements of a system and their interdependencies. To build a view of and navigate this framework visually, Donella Meadows' "Places to Intervene in a System"—outlining twelve "leverage points" that give further insight into how complex systems behave and where opportunities for small shifts that produce big impacts exist—can be applied as a set of flexible questions layered on a series of stocks and flow diagrams (Meadows, 2015).
In combination, these approaches provide a method to (1) "bound" the system being analysed; (2) break down the 'material' states; (3) assess norms and system interactions; and (4) bring it all together to define root causes and identify critical levers for change (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Provide a visual to show this ‘joint’ framework/method?
In what Dan Hill (2012) refers to as "the architecture of a problem," defining the boundaries of a system is an integral part of systems thinking that has significant implications for what is being considered in the analysis of a system, how it is understood, from which perspective, and which leverage points are likely to be identified (Midgley, 2006). It can be broken down by first considering the problem definition before then defining boundary lines with explicit values that create a description of the surrounding context.
With the green job deficit presented in this paper—"demand for clean energy jobs in the UK is outpacing the available workforce"—Figure 2 visually articulates the system layers, niches, organisations and actors that are involved in the interrelated education, skills and employment systems that create and supply the demand for clean energy jobs.
Figure 2, showing system layers, niches, organisations and actors (with what is included in the analysis and what is excluded from the analysis).
Once the system boundaries have been defined, there are now specific elements with which to build an understanding of what the system looks like and how they are connected. Meadows defines this as "the state of the system" and visualises "whatever standing stock is of importance" (2015) to use as a building block to detail the inflows and outflows that increase or decrease its volume.