Epistemological Implications of a System—Theoretical Understanding for Sustainability Models

ABSTRACT In the sense of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global efforts to create a sustainable society will not be sufficiently successful under the current geopolitical and socio‐economic trends. For this reason, recent sustainability research has increasingly focused on systemic coherence, the subject of cognition, and psychological and epistemological aspects. With regard to the sustainability discourse, this article proposes a perspective based on systems theory's findings in its enactivist interpretation. It understands this as a joint process of sense‐making that must be actively maintained on an ongoing basis. Scientific knowledge and human experience are not described as mutually exclusive and informing spheres but as part of the world of experience actively spanned by the organism in its self‐execution, which inherently involves ambiguities and complexity reductions that leave the subject and object undetermined. Such an understanding of systemic thinking should help to prevent the process of sustainable development itself from being called into question when some goals are inevitably missed.