Engineering design of an environmental management system: A transdisciplinary response to the rhino poaching problem

Abstract

The big issues we face today, that require properly engineered solutions, contain society, nature and man-made components. It is difficult to consider these systems within the traditional systems contexts, where we can set well-defined boundaries during the design (analytical decomposition) process. Still, the analysis/synthesis process must be thorough enough to ensure that the functional, physical and allocated architectures that are discovered and defined during the analytical phase, can deliver a reasonable, traceable outcome on synthesis of the solution. The authors firstly accept that the feedback loop and recursive causal nature inherent to eco-socio-technical systems cast them in the domain of wicked problems. Systems engineering relies heavily on being able to understand the questions and the needs of stakeholders to be addressed through the accurate conceptualising of a problem and associated solution space. Thus, in this paper we turn to the concept of complexity for guiding principles to address the wicked problems through appropriate research (analytical) methods that transcends disciplinary focussed solution finding. To highlight the proposed approach the development of an environmental management system as a response to the rhino-poaching problem is briefly discussed. The approach, when refined, should be able to address other resource management efforts.