Participatory Integrated Assessments (PIAs) and community engagement to foster interactive discourses about sustainability have also to confront a need to understand complex and linked social-ecological systems within which sustainability is sought. Over the last 30 years or so, a number of approaches involving collaborative research have been taken under the general rubric of “complexity studies,” and they have been pursued largely independently by groups of natural scientists and mathematicians, or social scientists and historians. There have been at least three overlapping approaches taken. Twelve examples of these are identified and briefly discussed. Applications of complexity studies to PIAs help justify and inform the processes used for assessments, identify key concepts and arguments that the assessments will likely have to address, and provide broad interpretive backgrounds for the larger scale and longer duration systemic processes which nevertheless can impact upon or constrain the phenomena that PIAs consider at smaller scales. A major challenge is how to make these systems perspectives accessible and usable for PIAs. Given the tasks implied by this, a special role is identified for an academic network to keep track of and help develop complex systems thinking while also interpreting it as possible inputs for PIAs.
