Recognising and Realising the Field of Systems Research in Itself and for Itself

What is the current shape and internal logic of the field of systems research, in its manifold expressions across disciplines, practices, and epistemologies? Why does systems research, despite widespread application, struggle to maintain coherence and a sense of shared identity? What could a renewed, collective agenda look like, rooted in a pluralistic “cybersystemic” community, that enables the field to mature without sacrificing its creative diversity?

The 2026 Agenda for the Cybersystemic Community explores these questions against the backdrop of a field whose influence has spread widely while its centre of gravity has grown elusive. Systems ideas appear in sustainability, governance, design, organisational change, and philosophy, yet the very success of this diffusion risks a quiet erasure of lineage. Concepts re-emerge in ever-new guises, sometimes without resonance across traditions. What looks like vibrancy may also signal fragmentation.

A review of recent publications across three key journals reveals ten thematic clusters. They testify to the breadth of contemporary systems work, but also to a shortage of integrative reflection: shared ontological assumptions, epistemic commitments, and value orientations remain largely implicit. The authors draw on Jürgen Renn’s notion of “epistemic networks” to reframe the field not as a discipline with borders but as a living ecology constituted through relations, through what systems researchers care about, attend to, and bring into conversation.

Coherence, in this view, arises not from standardisation but from cultivated relationality: spaces of inquiry where plural methods and paradigms can encounter one another without being reduced to a common denominator. The proposed 2026 agenda gestures toward such an infrastructural commons, an invitation to a cybersystemic community capable of holding divergence and gaining momentum.

Klein, Louis, Pamela Buckle, Nam Nguyen, Rika Preiser, Philippe Vandenbroeck, and Ray Ison. ‘Recognising and Realising the Field of Systems Research in Itself and for Itself: The 2026 Agenda for the Cybersystemic Community. Systems Research and Behavioral Science n/a, no. n/a (2025). https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3219.