Managing sustainability using system dynamics: Selected papers from the Tenth European System Dynamics Workshop, at the University of Stuttgart, Germany

The contents of this special issue have three things in common.First, all draw their methodology from the field of System Dynamics modelling, or SD (Forrester, 1958(Forrester, , 1961(Forrester, , 1968)).Second, early versions of the ideas published here were first presented at a workshop that took place in Stuttgart in June 2023.Third and last, they all relate to the topic "Managing Sustainability."Each of these commonalities merits brief comment: the first is addressed directly below, while the remaining pair is discussed in subsequent sections.Today, not least in this journal, SD is accepted as a member of "Systems Science," one of the range of approaches that make up that broad and variegated field (Jackson, 2009(Jackson, , 2019)).This was not always the case as SD emerged with very little evident support from systems science, drawing primarily on ideas from servomechanism theory (Lane, 2007(Lane, , 2022)), although having a wide range of contemporary influences (Crossett, 2007) and being part of the "techno-optimism" prevalent at that time (Malczynski & Lane, 2023).That said, detailed analysis shows how the ideas of SD fit comfortably with other approaches that take an interest in feedback, a core systems notion (Richardson, 1991), while the increase in articles in this journal-whether published in previous special issues or as individually submitted research articles-are evidence of the creation of richer connections that exist today (Jackson, 2021).