From Complex Systems to Transdisciplinarity

This volume, edited and co-authored by Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría, is an important book for our times. It illustrates the necessity of utilizing transdisciplinary approaches to address the unremitting onslaught of environmental disasters in the post-COVID-19 era. It serves as an essential primer for understanding the critical intersections between complexity, sustainability, and resilience. Readers will undoubtedly become more reflective about their own inquiries as they learn how scholars from different fields integrate knowledge to offer innovative and meticulously researched insights regarding many of today’s most pressing global issues.

The unity of science is a recurrent question in the whole of modern tradition, becoming more and more important with the present proliferation of disparate approaches, models, theories, and even paradigms. The development of complex system sciences may be an opportunity to propose a new idea of the unity of science “bottom–up,” based on the endless construction and deepening of the multifarious connections which every scientific approach requires for its own development. This is the core of a creative interpretation of transdisciplinarity. Gerardo del Cerro Santamaria and his co-authors provide us with a thought-provoking, brilliant, and path-breaking volume, that shows how transdisciplinarity is a necessary perspective to successfully face all the momentous challenges that the current global situation poses to us, and to make knowledge a real tool for a better way of living together, and of living for the planet.

From Complex Systems to Transdisciplinarity is a timely resource, reference work, and rich repository of knowledge for experienced practitioners, curious explorers, and [un-]disciplined students willing to look beyond the silos of modern higher educational institutions towards a horizon valorizing resilience, sustainability, and knowledge integration. Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría and his co-authors not only provide a solid theoretical foundation for transdisciplinary research, but also a roadmap for engagement with complex problems ranging from human beings, megaprojects, higher education, food systems, climate change, healthcare settings, and cities. This volume reaches and transcends the standard of epistemological humility that it sets itself, and in the process lays the foundation for a distinctive approach to transdisciplinary research.

From Complex Systems to Transdisciplinarity, edited and co-authored by Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría, takes resilience and sustainability to center stage, and brings to the fore the limits of individual disciplines in understanding the intricacies of nature, ecology, and capitalism as it applies to seven complex systems. The book advocates for an interconnected, creative, and holistic path while calling for a transition from complexity to transdisciplinarity as a means of integrating knowledge. This challenges conventional ontological and epistemological perspectives in the face of our rapidly changing societies. This book offers a novel analytical perspective and is a valuable resource for researchers and scholars interested in addressing global challenges through complex resilience, sustainability, and transdisciplinarity.

This rich scholarly endeavor by Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría and his co-authors constitutes a major effort in analytical innovation. The book links, in relevant ways, environment/ecology, a non-anthropocentric view of sustainability, and the transdisciplinary tools required to understand the unpredictability of the Earth system within the socioeconomic framework of capitalism. The authors analyze complex resilience and complex sustainability in seven complex adaptive systems and, in so doing, they respond to some recent radical challenges about the need to further integrate knowledge coming from a variety of perspectives. Such an integration, beyond the conventional domain of scientific knowledge, is formulated via transdisciplinarity as an academic feat akin to a meta-paradigm. This book is a masterful guide and a much-needed resource.

In a major achievement, Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría and his international group of colleagues have put together an outstanding volume that masterfully presents a novel transdisciplinary approach to issues of resilience and sustainability through a rigorous analysis of seven complex systems. From Complex Systems to Transdisciplinarity is an exceptional work that acknowledges how the complexity paradigm has allowed the pursuit of knowledge to make huge progress, and how the very success of this enterprise makes it necessary to complement it with a transdisciplinary perspective. The volume thoroughly expounds this analytical approach and demonstrates its usefulness. Del Cerro Santamaría and his co-authors have produced an important volume that will become a reference work in transdisciplinary studies. This book is a must read.

Today’s grand and global challenges are marked by irreducible complexities. They cannot be adequately addressed by reductionist approaches and are likely to not have a single, undisputable solution. The contributions to this volume, carefully edited by Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría, acknowledge these impurities and argue for approaches that transgress one-sided or narrow-minded perspectives. Thus, they offer topical insights into different domains and concepts that address issues of sustainability and resilience without reiterating traditional dichotomies between nature and culture or society and technology. The individual chapters are an excellent guide for all scholars who are interested in integrating and translating knowledge across and beyond academia, in engaging diverse stakeholders in heterogeneous constellations, and in finding ways forward in the face of essential unpredictability. Hence, the volume puts transdisciplinary in the centre of research practices that are both experimental and democratic. From Complex Systems to Transdisciplinarity is insightful and innovative, and a book you cannot ignore.

This book shows how the Anthropocene world is an unpredictable system of complex systems. To comprehend and transform this world towards sustainability, we need new ontological and epistemic lenses offered by transdisciplinary inquiry. Policymakers, scientists, and corporate leaders will benefit from reading this important collection of essays on the fundamental topics of resilience, sustainability, cybernetics, reflexivity, nature, and entropy.

In this ground-breaking book, Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría and his co-authors confront profound debates and challenges stemming from traditional ontological and epistemological perspectives in the context of rapidly transforming global dynamics affecting various aspects of capitalist development. Through meticulous examination of complex resilience and sustainability across distinct complex adaptive systems, encompassing human beings, megaprojects, higher education, food systems, climate change, healthcare settings, and cities, they advocate a critical shift from complexity to transdisciplinary as a means of knowledge integration. The book delves into intricate facets of complex adaptive systems, exploring second-order cybernetics, entropy’s role, and reflexivity within today’s cognitive-reflexive phase of global capitalism. This work is a required and valuable resource for those exploring resilience and sustainability through complexity and transdisciplinary lenses.