Setting goals

We are at an important critical point in the process of ecosystem health investigation and management, one that requires a shift of focus away from complaints and problems (disease) to the question of directional change. Having defined the system and its owners, and made some initial diagnoses along with the stakeholders, we need to look ahead. What's the ‘point’, the ‘goal’ of the stories we are telling? Where do we want to go? The literature on intervention into systems strongly emphasizes a shift away from thinking about problems to thinking about desirable and feasible systemic changes. So far in this book, we have taken a broadly medical view – starting with complaints, making investigations and diagnoses – albeit ‘chastened’ by health ideas. Even Soft Systems Methodology refers to a ‘problematic situation’. Since this book is about health and ecosystems, I will argue that our ultimate goal is health. I will also argue that the achievement of health requires an entirely different mind-set from that which is useful for solving medical problems.

Good health is the ability to achieve reasonable, self-defined goals, which I shall elaborate on later in this chapter. If this is so, then we need to set goals in order to measure whether or not we are able to achieve them. But which goals? Whose goals?