Managing systemic risk through transformative change: Combining systemic risk analysis with knowledge co-production

Increasing interconnectedness, along with the effects of climate change and other global risk drivers, has led to mounting systemic risks in the complex systems that characterize our world. Systemic risks, with their cascading impacts and long-term sustainability concerns, necessitate transformative approaches to manage their effects across system scales and dimensions. To date, however, an “operationalization gap” impedes translating between propositions for transformative change and policy options for addressing systemic risk. Here, we propose combining systemic risk analyses with local approaches, prominently including knowledge co-production, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of complex systems. This combined approach can support stakeholders in designing transformative risk management and adaptation interventions that balance individual and higher-order interactions, incorporate diverse viewpoints, and thus manage systemic risks and leverage transformation potential more effectively. Furthermore, we suggest that a risk-layering approach can help differentiate, prioritize, and orchestrate these options for incremental and transformative changes.